Vehicle-Deck Fires Aboard Ropax Ships: A Comparison Between Numerical Modelling and Experimental Results

According to an official study conducted by the IMO Correspondence Group on Casualty Analysis concerning the fire incidents that occurred on the vehicle-decks of RoPax ships, covering the period from 1994 to 2011, it has been shown that a very serious incident has occurred every other year since 2002, resulting in six constructive total losses. The results of this review shed the light on the need to investigate the application of fire models to simulate fire scenarios that may occur on the vehicle-decks aboard RoPax ships. This will be very useful for the RoPax designers who are willing to introduce new technologies or deviate from the current prescriptive regulations of fire safety design in order to reduce the risk of such catastrophic accidents. The aim of this paper is to present the results of a comparison between the predictions of three different fire models and the experimental results of a model-scale fire test that represents a fire scenario on a vehicle-deck aboard a RoPax ship. A statistical analysis technique was used to illustrate the ability of each fire model to predict five outputs of concern. The main conclusion of this comparison is that there is always an optimal fire model that can predict one or more of the five outputs of concern with results in good agreement with the measured values.