Hi, I''ve just started to simulate using PyroSim. I have no experience with CFD or FDS yet My first project is to simulate a "Boat-hotel", a storage-senter for boats in the winter-season. I''m wondering if there is materials like fiberglass, plastic and fabric used for canopy available in PyroSim?
I''m also wondering if anyone have created a boat in PyroSim, and if there is a template for a boat out on the web? 

Thanks

Øystein

The material input situation with FDS is a bit depressing.  Here is a thread at the FDS forum that describes where we are on material data:

http://groups.google.com/group/fds-smv/browse_thread/thread/a26e6f4f303f2f14/c3d39ebd52ff20b1

The going wisdom is that variants of the same kind of thing (e.g. fabrics, cables, etc) have wildly different outcomes when burned.  If you want to model fabric burning, to get reliable results you need to do a lab experiment using the same kind of fabric under the same conditions (e.g. humidity), then use the results of the experiment as inputs for the simulation.  The community is slowly working toward making this process easier, but... well, slowly.

On the bright side, most modelers eventually find that they can get by without so much detail anyway.  It just depends on what you really need out of the model.  My understanding is that smoke control models can usually be done pretty well without elaborate materials.

I know of no boat templates, but maybe someone else here does.  Good luck!

Okay, thanks 
I got a tip from a friend to skip fabric and to simplify the construction as much as possible. I''m also going to add a time-delayed burner to simulate the diesel/petrol-tank in the boats
Thanks to piroud for this!

Will check out the FDS-forum, thank you!

But how do I get the "boat"-boxes to burn away, or even to catch on fire?

The option to allow obstructions to burn away is set on the surface.  To set the BURN_AWAY flag on a surface:

1. In the Edit Surfaces dialog, select a Layered surface
2. Select the Reaction tab
3. Select Allow obstruction to burn away

This only works with the Layered surface type.

The bigger part of the work is setting up the materials necessary to created the layered surface in question.  The best example I''ve seen of a burn away test is the sofa fire done by Steve Kerber at NIST:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7148561554212676974  (video)

I wanted to post his paper, but I wasn''t able to find it.  I attended a presentation he gave right after he created the model and most of the discussion focused on how many tries it took to calibrate the model parameters against the experiment.  Because burn away and flame spread is material-centric, this sort of modeling goes back to the issues we discussed earlier in the thread.