Stacking
commodities on wood pallets (left image) slows horizontal
fire spread, versus
absence of pallets (right image).
(January 5, 2015) Insurance
company FM Global uses Titan to simulate warehouse fires in unparalleled
resolution
Roughly 40 percent of all industrial property loss in the
United States comes from fire, and fire is the leading cause of commercial property
damage. For insurance companies, understanding how fires spread can help save
their industrial clients from massive property and business interruption
losses, ultimately saving both insurer and insured millions of dollars.
Businesses with large warehouses are at particular risk, because as storage
warehouses get bigger, providing adequate protection using traditional
ceiling-mounted sprinkler systems is becoming more challenging.
FM Global is one of the world’s largest commercial and
industrial insurance companies. Providing insurance to one in three Fortune
1000 companies, FM Global attributes its success to offering not only
comprehensive property insurance products but also world-class loss prevention
research and engineering services that help clients better understand steps
they can take to prevent fires and minimize loss if a fire does start. However,
for FM Global research scientist Yi Wang, fire suppression research affects far
more than his business’s bottom line.
“The goal of our research is to make protection standards
and solutions better,” Wang said. “We believe that the majority of property
loss is preventable. We develop solutions to prevent losses, share these
solutions, and promote improvement of protection standards.” Some of these
solutions Wang described came from research performed on the Titan
supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a US
Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory.