Fire modeling

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.

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

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

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

Oxygen-Limited Fires Inside Under-Ventilated Enclosures (OLIVE-FIRE)

August 9, 2022

Author(s)

Kevin B. McGrattan, Isaac Leventon

This report documents a series of fire experiments performed within steel electrical enclosures. The objective is to validate a simple empirical model that

A Simple Two-Step Reaction Scheme for Soot and CO

May 23, 2022

Author(s)

Kevin B. McGrattan, Randall J. McDermott, Jason E. Floyd

A relatively simple two-step combustion model is proposed for predicting soot and CO generation in under-ventilated fire simulations. The scheme consists of two

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

May 9, 2022

Author(s)

Walter W. Yuen, Wai Cheong Tam

The traditional concept of mean beam length (MBL) and its recommended empirical expression is demonstrated to be inaccurate for general application for the

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