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Search Publications by: Kevin B. McGrattan (Fed)

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Displaying 1 - 25 of 150

The Impact of Material Composition on Ignitability and Fire Growth. Volume 1: Full-Scale Burning Behavior of Combustible Solids Commonly Found in Nuclear Power Plants

February 13, 2024
Author(s)
Isaac Leventon, Michael Heck, Kevin B. McGrattan, Matthew Bundy, Rick D. Davis
This report provides an overview of quantitative measurement data and visual observations obtained from a series of 52 full-scale fire growth experiments conducted on 16 unique combustible solids including: natural and synthetic polymers, copolymers

Oxygen-Limited Fires Inside Under-Ventilated Enclosures (OLIVE-FIRE)

August 9, 2022
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Isaac Leventon
This report documents a series of fire experiments performed within steel electrical enclosures. The objective is to validate a simple empirical model that predicts the maximum heat release rate of a fire within a closed compartment as a function of its

A Simple Two-Step Reaction Scheme for Soot and CO

May 23, 2022
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Randall J. McDermott, Jason E. Floyd
A relatively simple two-step combustion model is proposed for predicting soot and CO generation in under-ventilated fire simulations. The scheme consists of two mixing-controlled reaction steps performed in series. Validation calculations are described

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 made for new or enhanced sub-models and measurements specifically for CFD models of fire.

Characteristics of Nuclear Power Plant Fires Involving Electrical Enclosures

November 10, 2021
Author(s)
Isaac Leventon, Kenneth Hamburger, Kevin B. McGrattan, Rick D. Davis
PRIMARY AUDIENCE Fire protection and fire probabilistic risk assessment engineers conducting or reviewing fire modeling that supports fire probabilistic risk assessments related to characteristics (e.g., ignition, fire growth, and peak heat release rate)

Heat Release Rates of Multiple Transient Combustibles

July 21, 2020
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan
This report documents heat release rate measurements of various transient combustibles; that is, non-permanent items found in industrial settings that can potentially contribute to an accidental fire. These items are often included in hypothetical fire

Response Bias of Electrical Cable Coatings at Fire Conditions (REBECCA-FIRE)

June 9, 2020
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Edward J. Hnetkovsky, Scott D. Bareham, Michael J. Selepak, Morgan Bruns
This report contains results of a multi-year experimental program called REBECCA-FIRE (Response Bias of Electrical Cable Coatings at Fire Conditions). Volume 2 of the three volume report focuses on the burning behavior of electrical cables that are

Determining Flow Resistance through Vegetation Canopy

May 2, 2020
Author(s)
Ryan L. Falkenstein-Smith, Kevin B. McGrattan
This study documents the measurement of the wind resistance of different types of vegetation. The measurements are made in a wind tunnel with a 2.0 m test section and 0.5 m by 0.5 m cross- section. Samples of vegetation have been cut into cubical volumes

Measurement of the Flow Resistance of Vegetation

April 1, 2019
Author(s)
Ryan L. Falkenstein-Smith, Kevin B. McGrattan, Blaza Toman, Marco G. Fernandez
This report documents the measurement of the wind resistance of different types of vegetation. The measurements are made in a wind tunnel with a 2.0 m test section and 0.5 m by 0.5 m cross- section. Samples of vegetation have been cut into cubical volumes

The Influence of Walls, Corners and Enclosures on Fire Plumes

March 19, 2018
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Michael J. Selepak, Edward J. Hnetkovsky
This report documents two series of compartment fire experiments in which a natural gas burner is positioned in a corner, or against a wall, or inside a steel cabinet, to assess the effects on the plume and compartment temperatures. The measurements

The Long-Term Maintenance of CFAST

September 20, 2017
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Richard D. Peacock, Glenn P. Forney
Even though zone fire models may seem like yesterday’s news, they still play a vital role in many aspects of fire protection engineering. How do we maintain this technology as it moves from a topic of research to a case study in knowledge management?

Progress in Modeling Wildland Fires using Computational Fluid Dynamics

June 12, 2017
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan
This paper presents a sensitivity study for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of grassland fires. The simulations are compared with the results of experiments conducted in northern Australia in 1986. The report of these experiments notes that

Simulating Enclosure Fire Dynamics and Suppression

February 19, 2017
Author(s)
Howard R. Baum, Kevin B. McGrattan
At least three different physics based approaches to fire dynamicssimulations have evolved over the years; lumped parameter or ''zone models'',computational fluid dynamics models based on classical turbulence modelingtechniques, and large eddy simulations

Heat Release Rates of Electrical Enclosure Fires (HELEN-FIRE)

April 8, 2016
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Scott D. Bareham
This report documents an experimental program to quantify the heat release rate and burning behavior of electrical enclosures commonly found in nuclear power plants. Electrical enclosures are a potential source of fire in nuclear power plants because they

Enforcing realizability in explicit multi-component species transport

October 5, 2015
Author(s)
Randall J. McDermott, Kevin B. McGrattan, Jason Floyd
A strategy is proposed to guarantee realizability of species mass fractions in explicit time integration of the partial differential equations governing fire dynamics, which is multi-component transport problem. For a mixture of $n$ species, the

Spent Fuel Transportation Package Response to the MacArthur Maze Fire Scenario

October 2, 2015
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Harold Adkins
The NRC has established requirements that are the design bases for packaging and transportation of spent nuclear fuel assemblies under normal conditions of transport (NCT) and for hypothetical accident conditions (HAC). Real-world accidents of greater

Validation of Fire Models Applied to Nuclear Power Plant Safety

September 1, 2015
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Richard D. Peacock, Kristopher J. Overholt
The paper highlights key components of a fire model validation study conducted by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Electric Power Research Institute. These include the selection of fire phenomena of interest to nuclear power plant safety, the

Fire Modeling for the Fire Research, Fire Protection, and Fire Service Communities

September 8, 2014
Author(s)
Kevin B. McGrattan, Randall J. McDermott, Glenn P. Forney, Kristopher J. Overholt, Craig G. Weinschenk, Jason E. Floyd
The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) was first publicly released in 2000, and it has recently undergone its fifth major revision. Since its first release, FDS has been applied in three major areas: basic research in fire dynamics, performance-based design

Response to Comments on the National Institute of Standards and Technology Investigation of the 2001 World Trade Center Fires

April 15, 2014
Author(s)
Richard G. Gann, Anthony P. Hamins, Therese P. McAllister, Kevin B. McGrattan, William M. Pitts, Kuldeep R. Prasad
The editor of a special issue of Fire Technology invited the NIST authors to address the NIST Investigation of the WTC disaster and associated practice and research progress in the 10 years since then. The three published papers are a summary of the