Fire fighting

News and Updates

NIST Conducts Full-Scale Experiments to Demonstrate Flammability Risk of Residential Upholstered Furniture (RUF) and Potential Mitigation Strategies

March 12, 2020

The NIST Flammability Reduction Group (FRG) is conducting a series of full-scale fire experiments in collaboration with the National Fire Research Laboratory

Read about Fire Data Lab from the Western Fire Chiefs Association

Fire Data Lab: bringing fire service data analytics into the twenty-first century

August 16, 2019

As the volume of available data swells and analysis methods grow ever more sophisticated, a growing number of public safety agencies are turning to data

NIST, Partners Set Research Agenda for Protecting Firefighters from Harm

March 23, 2016

If there is anything common among the 1.1 million firefighters—both career and volunteer—serving in the United States, it's that at any moment, they may be

Why Firefighters Get Steam Burns: Exploratory Study Underway

April 27, 2015

A mystery has raged for decades surrounding accounts of firefighters who receive steam burns through their protective clothing. One ruling theory is that the

Industry Impacts

Photo of a burnt faceplate from a firefighter's gear

Firefighter Protective Equipment

Firefighters rely on self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBA) to protect them from dangerous heat and toxic smoke. NIST research helped to improve industry

Projects and Programs

Smart Fire Fighting

In 2011, the fire departments in the United States responded to more than 484,5001 structure fires. These fires resulted in approximately 2,640 civilian

Low Heat Release Upholstered Furniture

To reduce the flammability of residential upholstered furniture (RUF), the fire safety community has developed test methods and mitigation strategies based on

Fire Research Grants and Cooperative Agreements

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 Communities Program

This program reduces community fire risk by 1) increasing the fire resilience of wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities and 2) enhancing the safety and

Publications

On the Use of Machine Learning Models to Forecast Flashover Occurrence in a Compartment

September 15, 2020

Author(s)

Jun Wang, Wai Cheong Tam, Paul A. Reneke, Richard D. Peacock, Thomas G. Cleary, Eugene Yujun Fu, Grace Ngai, Hong va Leong

This paper presents a study to examine the potential use of machine learning algorithms to build a model to forecast the likelihood of flashover occurrence for

Time Series Feature Extraction and Selection Tool for Fire Data

September 15, 2020

Author(s)

Jun Wang, Youwei Jia, Eugene Yujun Fu, Jiajia Li, Wai Cheong Tam

This paper aims to facilitate the use of machine learning to carry out supervised classification/regression tasks for time series data in fire research

Generating Synthetic Sensor Data to Facilitate Machine Learning Paradigm for Prediction of Building Fire Hazard

July 10, 2020

Author(s)

Wai Cheong Tam, Eugene Yujun Fu, Richard D. Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Jun Wang, Jiajia Li, Thomas G. Cleary

This paper presents a learning-by-synthesis approach to facilitate the utilization of a machine learning paradigm to enhance situational awareness for fire

Prevention of Cooktop Ignition Using Detection and Multi-Step Machine Learning Algorithms

April 27, 2020

Author(s)

Wai Cheong Tam, Eugene Yujun Fu, Amy E. Mensch, Anthony P. Hamins, Christina Yu, Grace Ngai, Hong va Leong

This paper presents a study to examine the potential use of machine learning models to build a real-time detection algorithm for prevention of unattended

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

ToGS Turnout Gear Selector

Turnout Gear Selector (ToGS) helps the manufacturers, purchasers and users of fire turnout gear evaluate and select the turnout coat and pants ensemble that