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@PHDTHESIS{Brger:1049044,
author = {Börger, Kristian},
title = {{I}mprovement and {V}alidation of {V}isibility {M}odels in
{F}ire {S}afety},
volume = {74},
school = {Wuppertal},
type = {Dissertation},
address = {Jülich},
publisher = {Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH Zentralbibliothek, Verlag},
reportid = {FZJ-2025-05139},
isbn = {978-3-95806-857-5},
series = {Schriften des Forschungszentrums Jülich IAS Series},
pages = {ix, 97},
year = {2025},
note = {Dissertation, Wuppertal, 2024},
abstract = {In case of fire, smoke poses the major threat to the
occupants of public or residential buildings. Notably,
besides the smoke’s toxicity, reduced visibility can
prevent people from safe egress. Commonly applied fire
models to assess visibility at the building’s design stage
often rely on input quantities that could not be
consistently validated across multiple studies. Furthermore,
the common interpretation of simulation results does not
accurately mirror real-world conditions. This dissertation
aims to develop robust methods for the experimental
validation of visibility models and the enhanced
post-processing of simulation results in the context of
performance based design. The thesis comprises three
publications exploring these topics. The first publication
introduces the improvement of an existing photometric method
(LEDSA) to measure temporally and spatially resolved
extinction coe!cients in laboratory test fires. LEDSA
involves capturing the smoke induced change in intensity of
LEDs using consumer digital cameras. Validating against the
established MIREX measurement system revealed, that
utilizing RAW image data significantly improves measurement
accuracy compared to the previously used JPG files. While
using higher quality LEDs helped to increase reproducibility
of the measurements, further uncertainties of the model and
the experimental setup could be identified. In the second
publication, LEDSA is compared on multiple test fires to the
Radiance Method, which was developed at the University of
Waterloo. It involves measuring the contrast on adjacent
light and dark areas in image or video footage. The Radiance
Method measurements align well with LEDSA and the MIREX for
smoke from n-heptane pool fires, with much lower
computational e"ort than LEDSA. However, only LEDSA was in
line with the MIREX measurements for wood smouldering fires,
while the Radiance Method could only reproduce patterns of
the reference measurement. The third publication shifts
focus from model validation to application, introducing
visibility maps as a novel approach to assess visibility in
performance based design. By post-processing existing data
from fire simulations, the maps indicate areas where exit
signs remain visible along the route of egress. Integrating
the extinction coe!cient along the line of sight allows
applying Jin’s empirical correlation to non-homogeneous
smoke environments, providing for a more realistic
assessment of visibility, than the classical way of treating
it as a local quantity. Visibility maps can also account for
additional factors like view angle and visual obstruction of
exit signs.},
cin = {IAS-7},
cid = {I:(DE-Juel1)IAS-7-20180321},
pnm = {5111 - Domain-Specific Simulation $\&$ Data Life Cycle Labs
(SDLs) and Research Groups (POF4-511)},
pid = {G:(DE-HGF)POF4-5111},
typ = {PUB:(DE-HGF)3 / PUB:(DE-HGF)11},
doi = {10.34734/FZJ-2025-05139},
url = {https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1049044},
}