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Summary
The Material Flammability Characterization project is developing a database (the NIST Material Flammability Database) to maintain the experimental and analytical tools needed to enable quantitative prediction of material flammability behavior (e.g., ignition, steady burning, and fire growth). Initially proposed in 2016, this framework offers:
- Experimental measurements for material property calibration for a large variety of materials collected across a range of length scales (multiple test apparatus).
- Material properties relevant to fire modeling are determined (i.e., calibrated) through automated analysis of these mg-scale and g-scale measurements.
- Calibrated properties can be used as model inputs in simulations of fire behavior conducted in the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS).
- Comprehensive measurements for fire model validation
The NIST Material Flammability Database has evolved to include new classes of measurement data, a growing library of automated tools for property calibration, and an ever-increasing set of target materials. This effort also provides a framework to develop standard formats for experimental data used for fire model calibration and protocols to compare simulation results.
Description
Objective
To develop a database that maintains the experimental and analytical tools, measurement data for fire model calibration, material property sets, and validation data needed to enable quantitative prediction of material flammability behavior (e.g., ignition, steady burning, and fire growth).
Technical Idea
To develop, maintain, and apply the experimental and analytical tools necessary to calibrate material property data used by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) fire models and to provide unique measurement data that can validate their performance. This research effort will also develop standard formats for experimental data used for fire model calibration and protocols to perform comparisons between experimental data and simulation results. Collectively, these tools and related datasets will improve collaboration in the fire safety science community and allow for the quantification of how measurable differences in material properties impact real fire behaviors, resulting in the design of materials and products with reduced flammability, more accurate testing for fire reconstruction and investigations, and improved confidence in fire model predictions.
Research Plan
The Material Flammability Characterization Project is developing experimental and analytical tools that provide the measurement data and analysis capabilities needed to calibrate material properties used as fire model inputs and to validate their ability to predict flammability response. This requires a comprehensive set of measurements performed across a range of configurations and scales: e.g., milligram scale thermal analysis tests, bench-scale gasification and burning experiments, and intermediate to full-scale flame spread and fire growth experiments. A key component of this project is the development of the physical and digital infrastructure (as well as standardized data and metadata formats) that enables efficient production, storage, analysis, visualization, and analysis of these varied measurements, material property sets, and numerical simulation results.
