Study on the uncertainty of the available time under ship fire based on Monte Carlo sampling method

Available safety egress time under ship fire (SFAT) is critical to ship fire safety assessment, design and emergency rescue. Although it is available to determine SFAT by using fire models such as the two-zone fire model CFAST and the field model FDS, none of these models can address the uncertainties involved in the input parameters. To solve this problem, current study presents a framework of uncertainty analysis for SFAT. Firstly, a deterministic model estimating SFAT is built. The uncertainties of the input parameters are regarded as random variables with the given probability distribution functions. Subsequently, the deterministic SFAT model is employed to couple with a Monte Carlo sampling method to investigate the uncertainties of the SFAT. The Spearman’s rank-order correlation coefficient (SRCC) is used to examine the sensitivity of each input uncertainty parameter on SFAT. To illustrate the proposed approach in detail, a case study is performed. Based on the proposed approach, probability density function and cumulative density function of SFAT are obtained. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis with regard to SFAT is also conducted. The results give a high-negative correlation of SFAT and the fire growth coefficient whereas the effect of other parameters is so weak that they can be neglected.