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 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

Fire Risk Reduction in Buildings Program

Ongoing

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

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

Publications

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

Development of a Flashover Prediction Model for Compartment Fires Using Support Vector Regression

April 1, 2022

Author(s)

Andy Tam, Jun Wang, Richard D. Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Eugene Yujun Fu, Thomas Cleary

This report provides additional technical details to an article entitled P-Flash – A Machine Learning-based Model for Flashover Prediction using Recovered

Current and Future Parameters Used by FDS

December 15, 2021

Author(s)

Kevin B. McGrattan, Jason Floyd

This paper discusses important input parameters used by the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire. Suggestions are

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

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