Fire detection

News and Updates

A fireball rushes out of the opening of a small metal compartment in a concrete room.

A Machine Learning-Based Solution Could Help Firefighters Circumvent Deadly Backdrafts

October 17, 2022

The NIST team got data from hundreds of backdrafts in the lab to use as a basis for a model that can predict them.

AI May Come to the Rescue of Future Firefighters

August 10, 2022

New research suggests that AI could provide first responders with a much-needed heads-up about a dangerous condition called flashover.

The Journey to Commercialize Cutting-Edge Sensor Technology

May 17, 2022

In the early 2000’s, Abhishek Motayed found his way to the NIST campus as a contractor, working in what became the Material Measurement Laboratory (MML). Within

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

Real-Time Flashover Prediction Model for Multi-Compartment Building Structures Using Attention Based Recurrent Neural Networks

March 17, 2023

Author(s)

Wai Cheong Tam, Eugene Yujun Fu, Jiajia Li, Richard D. Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Thomas Cleary, Grace Ngai, Hong Va Leong, Michael Xuelin Huang

This paper presents the development of an attention based bi-directional gated recurrent unit model, P-Flashv2, for the prediction of potential occurrence of

Measurements and Predictions of the Aerosol Dynamics of Smoke

September 30, 2022

Author(s)

Amy Mensch, Haley Hamza, Thomas Cleary

Better understanding and ability to predict the aerosol dynamics of soot can improve life safety predictions generated by fire modeling tools. NIST's fire

Real-time Forecast of Compartment Fire and Flashover based on Deep Learning

April 6, 2022

Author(s)

Tianhang Zhang, Zilong Wang, Ho Yin Wong, Wai Cheong Tam, Xinyan Huang, Fu Xiao

Forecasting building fire development and critical fire events in real-time is of great significance for firefighting and rescue operations. This work proposes

Development of a Flashover Prediction Model for Compartment Fires Using Support Vector Regression

April 1, 2022

Author(s)

Wai Cheong Tam, Jun Wang, Richard D. Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Eugene Yujun Fu, Thomas Cleary

This report provides additional technical details to an article entitled P-Flash – A Machine Learning-based Model for Flashover Prediction using Recovered

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