Fire fighting

News and Updates

Flames rising from a burning fence are spreading to a tree above and a shed nearby.

NIST Study Finds Wildfire Hazards in Residential Fences and Mulch Beds

August 11, 2022

When building fences and landscaping their properties, homeowners should keep fire safety on the top of their minds.

Illustration shows two houses from above with distances marked between house, woodpile and shed for fire safety.

NIST Offers First-of-a-Kind Guidance for Holistic Home and Community Wildfire Protection

March 1, 2022

Once they have a foothold, severe wildfires can quickly overwhelm a community, particularly one that is densely packed. To shield houses against such a fierce

Draft California Fire Code Includes NIST Tool to Evaluate Wildfire Hazard

September 13, 2021

Severe wildfire disasters are often the product of numerous factors — vegetation, drought, a lack of firefighting resources, and many others — coalescing

Industry Impacts

Photo of a burnt faceplate from a firefighter's gear

Firefighter Protective Equipment

Firefighters rely on self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBA) to protect them from dangerous heat and toxic smoke. NIST research helped to improve industry

Projects and Programs

Indoor Localization and Tracking

Ongoing

This web page is simply a pointer to another page that covers the extensive research program in indoor localization and tracking at NIST.

Smart Fire Fighting

Ongoing

In 2011, the fire departments in the United States responded to more than 484,5001 structure fires. These fires resulted in approximately 2,640 civilian

Low Heat Release Upholstered Furniture

Ongoing

To reduce the flammability of residential upholstered furniture (RUF), the fire safety community has developed test methods and mitigation strategies based on

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 Spatial Temporal Graph Neural Network Model for Predicting Flashover in Arbitrary Building Floorplans

August 3, 2022

Author(s)

Wai Cheong Tam, Eugene Yujun Fu, Jiajia Li, Xinyan Huang, Jian Chen, Michael Xuelin Huang

Rapid fire progression, such as flashover, has been one of the leading causes for firefighter deaths and injuries in residential building environments. Due to

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

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

November 11, 2021

Author(s)

Wai Cheong 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

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

ToGS Turnout Gear Selector

Turnout Gear Selector (ToGS) helps the manufacturers, purchasers and users of fire turnout gear evaluate and select the turnout coat and pants ensemble that