What is Building Element

Fire engineering is a distinctive discipline within the construction industry that has its own language, design goals and analytical approaches. The use of sophisticated and computationally intensive numerical fire simulation tools is becoming more prevalent and the ability to share building-related data is getting serious consideration within the discipline. This chapter examines what fire engineers would like to achieve and how building information modelling (BIM) fits in with those goals. It discusses the types of fire simulation models that fire engineers use and gives a brief description of two particular fire growth models which use different means to represent a fire scenario. The chapter then considers how the IFC building product model can be used to transfer building geometry and property data to fire simulation models. Two commercial BIM tools have been used to create some simple test case buildings to illustrate the transfer process and highlight some of the problems encountered. Finally, the chapter describes some of the challenges involved in sharing building data with fire simulation models and provides recommendations for further work.