Every fire engineer who designs a stair pressurization system ends up asking the same question: is a multizone airflow network enough, or do I need CFD? CONTAM, NIST’s multizone airflow and contaminant transport code, solves a whole building in seconds. FDS, NIST’s Fire Dynamics Simulator, resolves the flow in three Read more
We ran the Steckler room fire (Test 14) in FDS and OpenFOAM 14 on the same grid, with a volumetric heat source and a passive soot scalar in OpenFOAM: temperatures, door flows, soot density, visibility and cost.
Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) has been the standard CFD tool for fire and smoke modeling for two decades — and for just as long, its pressure solve has been a CPU-bound bottleneck on large domains. FireX, NIST’s experimental GPU-accelerated development branch of FDS, is the first serious attempt to change Read more
The prediction of wildfire behavior is a critical challenge for fire safety engineers and environmental scientists. While the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is traditionally known for indoor fire modeling, its capabilities for large-scale wildland scenarios have expanded significantly. By combining geospatial data, advanced numerical methods, and the power of cloud Read more
Fires aren’t all created equal. In the world of fire protection engineering, understanding the nature of the fuel is the first step toward stopping it. This is where ISO 3941 comes in—it’s the international standard that categorizes fires into classes based on the fuel source. But what if you aren’t Read more
For Fire Safety Engineers, the transition from complex fluid dynamics simulations to regulatory compliance documentation is often the most time-consuming phase of a project. Performing FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) analyses requires immense computational power, but the ultimate goal is always the same: integrating those sophisticated results into a professional report Read more
When designing buildings, ensuring the structure can withstand a fire for a specified duration is paramount. This validation often hinges on understanding how the surrounding air temperature will evolve over time—a process often simplified by standard temperature curves. The most globally recognized standard for this is the ISO 834 standard Read more
We are thrilled to share the presentation we gave at the Southern European Summer School on Fire Dynamics Modeling 2025, organized by Professionisti Antincendio. Our talk, “Mesh Scalability and Computing,” explores a crucial topic for anyone working with engineering simulations: how to optimize performance and reduce computation time. As engineers, Read more
Yesterday, Fire Models released FDS 6.10.0, the newest version of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS)! This release is packed with improvements, bug fixes, and exciting new features that will help you take your fire modeling to the next level. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights, drawing from Read more
Data centers are the backbone of the modern world, powering everything from social media to online banking. But the surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is placing unprecedented demands on these facilities, pushing power densities to new heights and exacerbating existing fire risks. As AI models grow increasingly complex, they require Read more