Fire modeling

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

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

Projects and Programs

Safety of Building Occupants Project

Ongoing

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

Ongoing

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

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

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

The MaCFP Condensed Phase Working Group: A Structured, Global Effort Towards Pyrolysis Model Development

November 23, 2021

Author(s)

Isaac Leventon, Benjamin Batiot, Morgan Bruns, Simo Hostikka, Yuji Nakamura, Pedro Reszka, Thomas Rogaume, Stanislav Stoliarov

The International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) Working Group on Measurement and Computation of Fire Phenomena (i.e., the MaCFP Working Group) has

A calibration and sampling technique for quantifying the chemical structure in fires using GC/MSD analysis

September 23, 2021

Author(s)

Ryan Falkenstein-Smith, Kimberly Harris, Kunhyuk Sung, Tianshui Liang, Anthony Hamins

This work presents an approach to measure, calibrate, and verify local concentrations of combustion products in pool fires steadily burning in a quiescent

CFAST - Consolidated Fire and Smoke Transport (Version 7) Volume 5: CFAST Fire Data Generator (CData)

June 11, 2021

Author(s)

Paul A. Reneke, Richard D. Peacock, Stanley W. Gilbert, Thomas Cleary

This document provides documentation for creating and running Monte Carlo simulations with the Consolidated Fire And Smoke Transport (CFAST) model using the

A Fundamental Assessment of the Concept of Mean Beam Length for Application for Multi-dimensional Non-Gray Radiative Heat Transfer

December 7, 2020

Author(s)

Walter W. Yuen, Andy Tam

The traditional concept of mean beam length and its recommended empirical expression are demonstrated to be inaccurate for general application for multi

Software

CFAST

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

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 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