Fire on the Web

collection of fire test photos

Fire on the Web is a collection of resources from the Building and Fire Research Laboratory's Fire Research Division at NIST.  These Web pages provide links to fire related software, experimental fire data and mpeg/quick time movies of fire tests that can be downloaded and/or viewed with a Web browser.

Fire Tests/Data

  • Diffusion Flame Measurements - Profile data are presented here to aid research on the chemical structure of laminar, hydrocarbon diffusion flames - both for comparisons with other experimental results as well as for evaluating the predictions of flame models. Specifically, measurements made at NIST during the period 1984-1998 of species concentrations (mole fraction), temperatures (K), and velocities (cm/s) are included for two diffusion flame systems.
  • Residential Smoke Alarms - In cooperation with the United States Fire Administration, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, and other sponsors,, NIST has evaluated current and emerging smoke alarm technology responses to common residential fire scenarios and nuisance alarm sources. Data for more than 30 real-scale tests are available and include the time varying concentrations of CO, CO2, and O2, smoke obscuration, and temperature at multiple locations in the structure. The response of numerous smoke alarms place throughout the structures are also included.
  • Passenger Trains - The Fire Research Division has been involved in research related to passenger train fire safety since the 1970's. The results of these research studies are summarized here.  The complete reports are available as Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

 

Software/Models

  • NIST Fire Dynamics Simulator and Smokeview  -  FDS is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow. Smokeview is a visualization program that is used to display the results of an FDS simulation.
  • ALOFT-FT - is a smoke plume trajectory model for personal computers.
  • CFAST/FAST (and FASTLite) -  CFAST is a zone model that predicts the effect of a specified fire on temperatures, various gas concentrations and smoke layer heights in a multi-compartment structure. FAST and FASTLite are graphical user interfaces (GUI) for the computational model (CFAST). They include the FIREFORM tools package. FASTlite is no longer distributed. The complete functionality of FASTLite is included in the FAST package.
  • Fire Modeling Software Online - A collection of fire related software developed by the Building and Fire Research Laboratory available for free download.
     
  • ToGS - Turnout Gear Selector (ToGS) helps the manufacturers, purchasers and users of fire turnout gear evaluate and select the turnout coat and pants ensemble that best meets their needs.

Publications Information

Other

  • Holiday Fire Safety - Trees used indoors for the holidays account for approximately 400 fires annually, resulting in 10 deaths, 80 injuries and more than $15 million in property damage. This video demonstrates the how quickly the fire can develop when a DRY tree is exposed to an open flame. 
  • Fire Research Division - The Fire Research Division develops, verifies, and utilizes measurements and predictive methods to quantify the behavior of fire and the means to reduce the impact of fire on people, property, and the environment.
  • newsletter (link to Fire.Gov)Fire.Gov - On-line newsletter for the Fire Services.