Fires are difficult and costly to model, so engineers seldom bother. A new system makes it easier.
Fires have always been a serious safety concern, and remain so in Europe. Although the trend is broadly downwards, Europe still suffers around 4 000 deaths annually from tens of thousands of building or house fires. These cost Europe over EUR 100 billion per year.
Therefore, fire safety engineers regularly need to model fire behaviour as a substitute for expensive and complicated experiments. However, doing so poses many computational challenges.