Fire fighting

News and Updates

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

Red fire extinguisher is attached to pipes and hoses inside a vehicle.

NIST Tool Will Help Military Vehicles Fight Fires Using Less Harmful Chemicals

March 2, 2021

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new, interactive spreadsheet that will help the U.S. military

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.

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

High Temperature Performance of Fire Fighter Equipment

Ongoing

The performance of fire fighting equipment and gear is critical for the safety and effectiveness of fire fighters. Current equipment standards and test methods

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

Publications

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)

Andy 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)

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

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