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User's Guide for Smokeview Version 4.0 - A Tool for Visualizing Fire Dynamics Simulation Data

Published

Author(s)

Glenn P. Forney, Kevin B. McGrattan

Abstract

Smokeview is a software tool designed to visualize numerical calculations generated by the NIST Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow. These two tools are typically used together to respectively simulate and visualize the flow of smoke induced by a fire. Smokeview visualizes the smoke using traditional scientific methods such as displaying tracer particle flow, 2D or 3D shaded contours of gas flow data such as temperature and flow vectors showing flow direction and magnitude. Smokeview also visualizes smoke realistically so that one can experience the fire. This is done by displaying a series of partially transparent planes where the transparencies in each plane (at each grid node) are determined from soot densities computed by FDS. Smokeview also visualizes static data at particular times again using 2D or 3D contours of data such as temperature and flow vectors showing flow direction and magnitude. Examples of each visualization type are given.Windows PC versions of Smokeview and FDS and associated documentation may be downloaded from the web site http://fire.nist.gov/smokeview at no cost. Versions for Linux and SGI/IRIX may also be downloaded from the same location.
Citation
Special Publication (NIST SP) - 1017
Report Number
1017

Keywords

CFD models, computational fluid dynamics, field models, fire simulation, fluid flow, scientific visualization, simulation, visualization

Citation

Forney, G. and McGrattan, K. (2004), User's Guide for Smokeview Version 4.0 - A Tool for Visualizing Fire Dynamics Simulation Data, Special Publication (NIST SP), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=861305 (Accessed March 29, 2024)
Created August 1, 2004, Updated July 30, 2009