Fire detection

News and Updates

A fireball rushes out of the opening of a small metal compartment in a concrete room.

A Machine Learning-Based Solution Could Help Firefighters Circumvent Deadly Backdrafts

October 17, 2022

The NIST team got data from hundreds of backdrafts in the lab to use as a basis for a model that can predict them.

AI May Come to the Rescue of Future Firefighters

August 10, 2022

New research suggests that AI could provide first responders with a much-needed heads-up about a dangerous condition called flashover.

The Journey to Commercialize Cutting-Edge Sensor Technology

May 17, 2022

In the early 2000’s, Abhishek Motayed found his way to the NIST campus as a contractor, working in what became the Material Measurement Laboratory (MML). Within

Projects and Programs

Fire Research Grants and Cooperative Agreements

Ongoing

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

Engineered Fire Safe Products

Ongoing

The Engineered Fire Safe Products (EFSP) Project is developing a database (the NIST Material Flammability Database) to maintain the tools (experimental and

NIST/NRC Fire Research Collaborations

Ongoing

Since 2005, the NIST Fire Research Division has engaged in a collaborative research effort with the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research of the US Nuclear

Fire Risk Reduction in Communities Program

Ongoing

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

New insights into the ignition characteristics of liquid fuels on hot surfaces based on TG-FTIR

February 1, 2024

Author(s)

Jian Chen, Zhenghui Wang, Yanni Zhang, Yang Li, Wai Cheong Tam, Depeng Kong, Jun Deng

There are many potential hazards related with hot surface in industrial processes. Therefore, the ignition characteristics of liquid fuels on hot surfaces play

Explainable Machine Learning Based Flashover Prediction Model Using Dimension-Wise Class Activation Map

June 26, 2023

Author(s)

Linhao Fan, Wai Cheong Tam, Qi Tong, Eugene Yujun Fu, Tianshui Liang

This paper presents the development of an explainable machine learning based flashover prediction model, named xFlashNet. Synthetic temperature data from more

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

Measurements and Predictions of the Aerosol Dynamics of Smoke

September 30, 2022

Author(s)

Amy Mensch, Haley Hamza, Thomas Cleary

Better understanding and ability to predict the aerosol dynamics of soot can improve life safety predictions generated by fire modeling tools. NIST's fire

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

Tools and Instruments

Fire Emulator/Detector Evaluator

The fire emulator/detector evaluator (FE/DE) is a computer-controlled flow tunnel used to re-create the environments surrounding detectors in the early stages