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

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

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

Mixture Fraction Analysis of Combustion Products in Medium-Scale Pool Fires

November 13, 2020

Author(s)

Ryan Falkenstein-Smith, Kunhyuk Sung, Jian Chen, Anthony Hamins

A mixture fraction analysis is performed to investigate the characteristics of time-averaged gaseous species measurements made along the centerline of medium

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