Fire modeling

News and Updates

A fire test of an office building floor replica occurring in a fireproof compartment.

How Fire Causes Office-Building Floors to Collapse

March 24, 2020

Engineers and technicians at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) spent months meticulously recreating the long concrete floors supported

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

The Ninth Triennial International Fire & Cabin Safety Research Conference

October 29, 2019

Two members of the NIST Flammability Reduction group recently attended the Ninth Triennial International Fire & Cabin Safety Research Conference, which was

Guidelines for Participation in the 2020 MaCFP Condensed Phase Workshop

June 14, 2019

The Measurement and Computation of Fire Phenomena (MaCFP) Working Group of the International Association of Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) has released its

Projects and Programs

Fire Research Grants and Cooperative Agreements

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

Fire Risk Reduction in Buildings Program

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

Safety of Building Occupants Project

NIST will develop a model to predict evacuation decision-making during fires through a better understanding and quantification of the risk perceived by

Advanced Fire Modeling

The Fire Research Division develops and maintains a set of computational tools to analyze fire behavior. These tools include the Consolidated Fire and Smoke

Publications

Smoldering Propensity in Upholstered Furniture: Effects of Mockup Configuration and Foam Thickness

August 20, 2020

Author(s)

Jiuling Yang, Guillermo Rein, Haixiang Chen, Mauro Zammarano

Reduced-scale mock-ups had been developed to assess and regulate smoldering ignition resistance of residential upholstered furniture (RUF). However, there are

Estimation of the critical external heat leading to the failure of lithium-ion batteries

June 29, 2020

Author(s)

Wei Tang, Wai Cheong Tam, Liming Yuan, Thomas Dubaniewicz, Richard Thomas, John Soles

A detailed experimental investigation on the critical external heat leading to the failure of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries was conducted using an Accelerating

Effect of Pressure on the Heat Transfer of Pool Fire in a Closed Chamber

June 15, 2020

Author(s)

Jian Chen, Yubo Bi, Yanli Zhao, Wai Cheong Tam, Changhai Li, Shouxiang Lu

A combined analytical and experimental study was performed to determine the effect of pressure on the heat transfer of pool fire in a closed chamber. A series

Large-Scale Structure-Fire Interaction: National Fire Research Laboratory Commissioning Test, Experiment and Modeling

June 1, 2020

Author(s)

Randall J. McDermott, Glenn P. Forney, Matthew S. Hoehler, Matthew F. Bundy, Lisa Y. Choe, Chao Zhang

The photograph on the left shows a large-scale experiment studying the interaction between fire and mechanically- loaded building elements performed during the

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

CFAST

The Consolidated Model of Fire and Smoke Transport, CFAST, is a computer program that fire investigators, safety officials, engineers, architects and builders

Tools and Instruments

Fire Calorimetry Database (FCD)

The National Fire Research Laboratory (NFRL) operates calorimeters to measure the heat and combustion products for fires in the range of 50 kW to 20,000 kW