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

Fire Risk Reduction in Communities Program

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

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

Publications

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

June 11, 2021

Author(s)

Paul A. Reneke, Richard 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, Wai Cheong Tam

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

Experimental Study of the Effect of Ambient Pressure on Oscillating Behavior of Pool Fires

December 4, 2020

Author(s)

Jian Chen, Wai Cheong Tam, Wei Tang, Chao Zhang, Changhai Li, Shouxiang Lu

Pool fires are known to exhibit self-sustained oscillatory behavior, which plays an important role in the understanding of flame and fire spreading. To

Point Mean Beam Length - a New Concept to Enhance the Computational Efficiency of Multi- Dimensional Non-Gray Radiative Heat Transfer

December 3, 2020

Author(s)

Walter W. Yuen, Wai Cheong Tam

A new concept of point mean beam length (PMBL) is introduced. For enclosures with simple geometry, this concept provides a fundamental self-consistent

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