Multi-scale simulations of fire growth on a sandwich composite structure

A coupled pyrolysis/computational fluid dynamics model is used to investigate the fire contribution of glass fibre-reinforced polyester/balsa-cored sandwich composite structure in case of fire on board a ship. Prior to simulating real-scale scenarios, numerical simulations of experiments were performed on samples of the tested material of increasing size, for validation and evaluation purposes. The main idea was to assess gradually the ability of the model to reproduce the fire growth on our composite material faithfully. The numerical and experimental results are compared and discussed. Overall, the numerical results are in good agreement with the experimental data, encouraging simulations at real scale.