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Residential upholstered furniture (RUF) is the leading combustible in fatal fires in the United States. In the last few decades, fire-retardant (FRs) chemicals have been largely used in attempt to reduce RUF flammability; however, concerns about possible
Marcos Vanella, Ryan Falkenstein-Smith, Thomas Cleary
An extensive set of backdraft experiments has been performed at the NIST National Fire Research Laboratory. These experiments were conducted in a reduced scale compartment, and are part of defining the conditions conducive to backdraft. Further, the
Mohammed Morovat, Joseph Main, Jonathan Weigand, Malcolm Ammons, Fahim H. Sadek, Long Phan
This report describes the development and validation of a computational modeling approach for steel gravity frames with composite floor systems subjected to fire exposure. A full-scale compartment fire test conducted on a two-story steel gravity frame
Isaac Leventon, Mahdi Tlemsani, Mohammadhadi Hajilou, Xiaoyu Ju, Michael Gollner
9 Between December 2019 and January 2020, 14 full-scale experiments were conducted at the University of 10 Maryland (UMD) in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to measure 11 variations in burning behavior and fireb
Jienan Li, Michael F. Link, Shubhrangshu Pandit, Marc Webb, Cholaphan Deeleepojananan, Kathryn Mayer, Lauren Garofalo, Katelyn Rediger, Dustin Poppendieck, Stephen Zimmerman, Marina Vance, Vicki Grassian, Glenn Morrison, Barbara Turpin, Delphine Farmer
Wildfires are increasing in frequency, raising concerns that smoke can permeate indoor environments and expose people to chemical air contaminants. To study smoke transformations in indoor environments and evaluate mitigation strategies, we added smoke to
Gabriel Taylor, Anthony D. Putorti Jr., Scott Bareham, Christopher U. Brown, Wai Cheong Tam, Ryan Falkenstein-Smith, Stephen Fink, Michael Heck, Edward Hnetkovsky, Nicholas Melly, Kenneth Hamburger, Kenneth Miller
This report documents an experimental program designed to investigate high energy arcing fault (HEAF) phenomena for medium-voltage, metal-enclosed bus ducts and switchgear. This report covers full-scale laboratory experiments using representative nuclear
Ashley Russell, Kerrianne Buchanan, David Griffith, Heather Evans, Dimitrios Meritis, Lisa Ng, Anna Sberegaeva, Michelle Stephens
The 2023 National Institute of Standards and Technology Environmental Scan provides an analysis of key external factors that could impact NIST and the fulfillment of its mission in coming years. The analyses were conducted through three separate lenses
Recent experiments show that strong vortices, similar to fire whirls, can form far from a fire front in the region of smoldering fuel. These buoyancy-induced columnar vortices, visualized by entrained smolder smoke, were observed lofting hot embers into
An upward, buoyancy-driven flame spread on combustible solids is frequently the dominant contributor to the growth of fire in built environment. Thus, an ability to accurately predict the development of a fire is strongly linked to the accuracy of flame
Eric Mueller, Zakary Campbell-Lochrie, Carlos Walker-Ravena, Rory Hadden
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models have increased in use for studying scenarios relevant to wildland fires, such as examination of the driving processes in flame spread in vegetative fuels. However, these tools utilize a complex set of submodels
Alex Filkov, Virginie Tihay-Felicelli, Nima Masoudvaziri, David Rush, Andres Valencia, Yu Wang, David Blunck, Mario Valero, Kamila Kempna, Jeruzalemska Jan Smolka, Jacques De Beer, Zakary Campbell-Lochrie, Felipe Centeno, Muhammad Asim Ibrahim Stuvaregatan, Calisa Katiuscia Lemmertz, Wai Cheong Tam
Due to socio-economic and climatic changes around the world, large outdoor fires in the built environment have become one of the global issues that threaten billions of people. The devastating effects of them are indicative of weaknesses in existing
Alexander Maranghides, Eric Link, Christopher U. Brown, William D. Walton, William Mell, Steven Hawks
The 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, California quickly impacted the communities of Concow, Paradise, and Magalia, triggering widespread evacuation of 40000 people. The fire became the most deadly and destructive fire in California history, resulting in 85
Amy Mensch, Savannah Wessies, Anthony Hamins, Jiann C. Yang
While the impact of wildland-urban interface fires is growing, firebrand exposure is a significant but not well understood contributor to fire spread. The ignition threat of firebrand exposures can be characterized by measuring the heat transfer of glowing
Matthew Hoehler, Artur A. Chernovsky, Matthew Bundy, Esther Baumann
This paper applies coherent Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave Light Detection and Ranging to capture three-dimensional measurements of objects in fire at meters of stand-off distance. Despite the presence of flame depths up to 1.5 m obscuring the target
Previous studies have shown that most structure ignitions in wildland urban-interface fires are due to firebrand deposition and ignition. The heat transfer mechanisms involved in firebrand deposition need further study and characterization for better
Jennifer Berry, Mary Gregg, Amanda Koepke, Reta Newman, Kavita Jeerage
Dynamic vapor microextraction (DVME) is a potential method for the extraction and concentration of ignitable liquid (IL) residue in fire debris. This low flow rate, purge-and-trap headspace concentration method collects IL vapors onto a chilled adsorbent
Jiajia Li, Christopher U. Brown, Dillon Dzikowicz, Mary Carey, Wai Cheong Tam, Michael Xuelin Huang
A machine learning-based heart health monitoring model, named H2M, was developed. 24-hour electrocardiogram (ECG) data from 112 professional firefighters was used to train the proposed model. The model used carefully designed multi-layer convolution neural
Alexander Maranghides, Shonali Nazare, Eric Link, Kathryn Butler, Erik L. Johnsson, Matthew Bundy, Artur A. Chernovsky, Frank Bigelow, Steven Hawks, William (Ruddy) Mell, Anthony Bova, Thomas Milac, William Walton, Bob Raymer, Frank Frievalt
The NIST Outdoor Structure Separation Experiments are part of the NIST Structure Separation Experiments project, which is designed to assess structure-to-structure fire spread in the wildland-urban interface. In the first phase of this project, fire
Erik L. Johnsson, Kathryn Butler, Marco G. Fernandez, Shonali Nazare, Alexander Maranghides
A series of field experiments was conducted to examine the effects on fire spread toward a structure for firewood piles under conditions that may be encountered in a wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire. The fire behavior of a variety of firewood types in
Amy Mensch, Savannah Wessies, Anthony Hamins, Jiann C. Yang
Every year, thousands of wildfires burn all over the world threatening lives and property in the wildland-urban interface. These wildland-urban interface fires spread by radiation, direct flame contact, or firebrand transport. Firebrand exposures are a
An analysis of the backdraft phenomenon's mitigation from water suppression is con- ducted in a 2/5th scale compartment. Different volumes of water were introduced via a ceiling- mounted misting nozzle into the compartment, which hosted conditions
Wai Cheong Tam, Eugene Yujun Fu, Jiajia Li, Richard D. Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Thomas Cleary, Grace Ngai, Hong Va Leong, Michael Xuelin Huang
This paper presents the development of an attention based bi-directional gated recurrent unit model, P-Flashv2, for the prediction of potential occurrence of flashover in a traditional 111 m2 single story ranch-style family home. Synthetic temperature data
The selection of building materials and the design of the details of construction always play an important role in overall building fire safety. Two important fire safety considerations regarding the building structure are to minimize the likelihood of
Christopher U. Brown, Gregory W. Vogl, Wai Cheong Tam
A wireless sensor network was created to measure water-flow rate in a fire hose. An integrated electronic piezoelectric (IEPE) accelerometer was chosen as the sensor to measure the flow rate based on the vibrations generated by water flowing through a fire
Selvarajah Ramesh, Lisa Choe, Matthew Hoehler, Matthew Bundy
This paper presents the results of compartment fire experiments conducted on 9.1 m × 6.1 m steel-concrete composite floors in a full-scale, two-story, two-bays by three-bays steel gravity frame building to investigate the fire resilience of these widely