Fire detection

News and Updates

Firefighters spray water into a burning concrete building with a sign saying "NIST Fire Research."

How AI Could Alert Firefighters of Imminent Danger

June 1, 2021

Firefighting is a race against time. Exactly how much time? For firefighters, that part is often unclear. Building fires can turn from bad to deadly in an

New Fire-Simulating Tool Could Improve In-Flight Fire Safety

March 24, 2021

Some of the most dangerous fires are the ones you don’t see coming. That goes not only for fires in buildings but for those kilometers off the ground, aboard

NIST Conducts Full-Scale Experiments to Demonstrate Flammability Risk of Residential Upholstered Furniture (RUF) and Potential Mitigation Strategies

March 12, 2020

The NIST Flammability Reduction Group (FRG) is conducting a series of full-scale fire experiments in collaboration with the National Fire Research Laboratory

Projects and Programs

Fire Risk Reduction in Communities Program

Ongoing

This program reduces community fire risk by 1) increasing the fire resilience of wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities and 2) enhancing the safety and

Public Health Risks to First Responders

Ongoing

There is growing evidence that firefighters (FF) are being exposed to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) associated with their gear. The source of the

Fire Risk Reduction in Buildings Program

Ongoing

The research in this program (Fire Risk Reduction in Buildings, FRRiB) will enable reductions in the two single largest components of this U.S. structure fire

Fire Research Grants and Cooperative Agreements

Ongoing

Fire Research Grants and Cooperative Agreements support extramural work to reduce the total burden of fire on the U.S. economy, which is estimated as greater

Publications

A Generic Flashover Prediction Model for Residential Buildings Using Graph Neural Network

November 11, 2021

Author(s)

Andy Tam, Eugene Yujun Fu, Paul A. Reneke, Richard D. Peacock, Thomas Cleary

A generic graph neural network-based model is developed to predict the potential occurrence of flashover for different building structures. The proposed model

P-Flash – A Machine Learning-based Model for Flashover Prediction using Recovered Temperature Data

April 4, 2021

Author(s)

Jun Wang, Andy Tam, Youwei Jia, Richard Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Eugene Yujun Fu, Thomas Cleary

Research was conducted to examine the use of Support Vector Regression (SVR) to build a model to forecast the potential occurrence of flashover in a single

Sensors and Machine Learning Models to Prevent Cooktop Ignition and Ignore Normal Cooking

March 18, 2021

Author(s)

Amy Mensch, Anthony Hamins, Andy Tam, John Lu, Kathryn Markell, Christina You, Matthew Kupferschmid

Cooking equipment is involved in nearly half of home fires in the United States, with cooktop fires the leading cause of deaths and injuries in cooking-related

Predicting Flashover Occurrence using Surrogate Temperature Data

February 9, 2021

Author(s)

Andy Tam, Eugene Yujun Fu, Richard Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Jun Wang, Grace Ngai, Hong Va Leong, Thomas Cleary

Fire fighter fatalities and injuries in the U.S. remain too high and fire fighting too hazardous. Until now, fire fighters rely only on their experience to

Software

FDS and Smokeview

Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow. The software solves numerically a form of the Navier

Tools and Instruments

Fire Emulator/Detector Evaluator

The fire emulator/detector evaluator (FE/DE) is a computer-controlled flow tunnel used to re-create the environments surrounding detectors in the early stages