Introduction

Fire Dynamics Simulator is an open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software used to simulate the propagation of fire and smoke. It uses a Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) model applied to low-speed flows with thermal transport. It also comes with Smokeview, a visualization module.

Versions

The test case uses Fire Dynamics Simulator 6.7.6.

If you are interested in another version, please send us an email at qlab@qarnot.com.

Test case

Please ensure that you have created a Qarnot account here.

This test case is based on a roman Temple of Portonus fire simulation.

You can download the case folder here, which contains the test case as a .fds file. You should put it at the same folder level as the script to launch the calculation. Please note that it needs to be unzipped before it can be used on Qarnot. Your tree view should look like this :

• temple
  • templs.fds
• fds.py

Launching the case

Before starting a calculation with the Python SDK, a few steps are required:

• Retrieve the authentication token (here)
• Install Qarnot’s Python SDK (here)

Note: in addition to the Python SDK, Qarnot provides C# and Node.js SDKs and a Command Line.
Once everything is set up, the following script needs to be used to start the calculation.

Be sure you have copied your authentication token in the script (instead of <<<MY_SECRET_TOKEN>>>) to be able to launch the task on Qarnot.

fds.py

To launch this script, simply copy the preceding code in a Python script, put at the same level as the temple folder and execute python3 fds.py & in your terminal. You should copy the gist code (shown here) and not the raw code.

Results

At any given time, you can monitor the status of your task on the general web interface Console. The following figure shows a successful FDS demo simulation on Qarnot’s console.

You should also now have a result folder in the output bucket and on your computer containing all the numerical results. You can open the IMP_TEMPLE.smv in Smokeview. If you have it installed on your computer, simply use the following command in a terminal :  smokeview IMP_TEMPLE. To output images of the results, simply use the render option in Smokeview. Then, to create animations like the one below, third party softwares like FFMPEG can be used. You can read more about how to run a FFMPEG case on Qarnot here.

Wrapping up

That’s it! If you have any questions, please contact qlab@qarnot.com and we will help you with pleasure!