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Search Publications

NIST Authors in Bold

Displaying 1 - 25 of 3829

Compartment fires: challenges for fire modeling as a tool for safe design

February 1, 2024
Author(s)
Tarek Beji, Talal Fateh, Jason Floyd, hugues Pretrel, Anthony Hamins
The use of fire models to support fire protection engineering decisions requires an understanding of model shortcomings and assurance in their predictive robustness. This note is a summary of the online 'compartment fire' workshop that was organized prior

Building Fire Hazard Predictions Using Machine Learning

January 26, 2024
Author(s)
Eugene Yujun Fu, Wai Cheong Tam, Tianhang Zhang, Xinyan Huang
The lack of information on the fire ground has always been the leading factor in making wrong decisions . Wrong decisions can be made by individual firefighters, their local chiefs, and/or the incident commander. Any wrong decision at any level (scale)

The persistence of smoke VOCs indoors: partitioning, surface cleaning, and air cleaning in a smoke-contaminated house

October 13, 2023
Author(s)
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

Report on High Energy Arcing Fault Experiments: Experimental Results from Medium-Voltage Bus Duct and Switchgear Enclosures

September 15, 2023
Author(s)
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

National Institute of Standards and Technology Environmental Scan 2023: Societal and Technology Landscape to Inform Science and Technology Research

August 23, 2023
Author(s)
Ashley Boggs-Russell, Kerrianne Buchanan, David W. 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

A review of thermal exposure and fire spread mechanisms in Large Outdoor Fires and the Built Environment

July 28, 2023
Author(s)
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

Measuring Firebrand Heat Flux with a Thin-Skin Calorimeter

July 11, 2023
Author(s)
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

Coherent Laser Ranging of Deforming Objects in Fires at Sub-Millimeter Precision

July 7, 2023
Author(s)
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

Concentration of Ignitable Liquid Residue from Simulated Fire Debris by Dynamic Vapor Microextraction: Sensitivity to Instrument Settings and Debris Characteristics

July 6, 2023
Author(s)
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

Towards Real-Time Heart Health Monitoring in Firefighting Using Convolutional Neural Networks

June 28, 2023
Author(s)
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

NIST Outdoor Structure Separation Experiments (NOSSE) with Wind

May 31, 2023
Author(s)
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

Wind-driven Fire Spread to a Structure from Firewood Piles

March 30, 2023
Author(s)
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

Experimental Studies on the Heat Flux of Individual Firebrands

March 22, 2023
Author(s)
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

Examining the effectiveness of water suppression for mitigating backdrafts

March 19, 2023
Author(s)
Ryan Falkenstein-Smith, Thomas Cleary
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

Real-Time Flashover Prediction Model for Multi-Compartment Building Structures Using Attention Based Recurrent Neural Networks

March 17, 2023
Author(s)
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

Fire Resistance of Structural Members and Assemblies

March 1, 2023
Author(s)
Matthew Hoehler
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

FIRE RESILIENCE OF STEEL-CONCRETE COMPOSITE FLOOR SYSTEMS

November 30, 2022
Author(s)
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
Displaying 1 - 25 of 3829