Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

As a result of the development of the nonlinear theory, the complicated fire dynamics can be investigated by means of nonlinear methods, rather than the usually adopted linear approximation. In this paper the current practical nonlinear theory usually used in fire dynamics was described, and the topics and corresponding achievements in nonlinear fire dynamics were reviewed. The nonlinear methods described here mainly involve stability analysis and the characterization of chaotic attractors. Examples of stability analysis, power spectrum analysis and fractal dimension analysis used in nonlinear fire dynamics were addressed.