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Engineering Laboratory /Fire Research Division

Engineered Fire Safety Group

The Engineered Fire Safety Group develops and applies measurement science for cost-effective fire protection and risk-informed life safety decisions for buildings and wildland-urban interface communities.

The Engineered Fire Safety Group also develops advanced, validated models with quantified accuracy and integrates the knowledge, tools, and models to assess building performance with respect to ignition, fire growth and spread, detection, suppression, toxicity, and egress.

Post-Doc Program Outstanding applicants are sought for a number of postdoctoral fellowships available through the National Research Council Program. Group members act as research advisors for Post-Doctoral Fellows in a variety of project areas.

Highlights

News and Updates

Projects and Programs

Figure 1. FDS simulation of ceiling smoke deposition

Advanced Fire Modeling

Ongoing
Objective To develop and maintain robust, validated fire models—and the associated visualization and analysis tools—for performance-based fire safety, forensics (fire reconstruction), and fire research applications in the built and natural environments. Technical Idea Applications in fire protection
Smoke swirls around a white smoke detector on a ceiling.

Building Fire Safety Evaluation

Ongoing
Objective To enable a reduction in residential fire deaths and injuries by advancing household detection systems, conducting targeted research on smoke measurements and model validation, and assessing the impacts of new technologies on residential life safety. This project develops datasets and
Scrubber cropped

Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Transport

Completed
Objective - Create a well-characterized highly accurate reference measurement system at near industrial scale to demonstrate a framework for conducting low-uncertainty measurements of carbon dioxide emissions, and to improve and evaluate atmospheric dispersion models for reducing model uncertainties
ESO general Evacuation

Safety of Building Occupants Project

Completed
Objective: By 2016 1, to develop the framework for a model that will predict the evacuation decision-making of occupants in a building fire. This model will improve the accuracy of egress modeling tools used in performance-based design (PBD) of buildings. What is the new technical idea? To develop a

Publications

On the Design of a Firebrand Generator

Author(s)
Jiann Yang
Detailed design principles and calculations based on a generic firebrand generator with configuration commensurate with the NIST Firebrand Generators are

The Global and Local Structure of Medium-Scale Pool Fires

Author(s)
Kunhyuk Sung, Ryan Falkenstein-Smith, Matthew Bundy, Marco Fernandez, Anthony Hamins
A series of experiments are reported that characterize key features of the structure of eight medium-scale pool fires (0.3 m to 0. 4 m) burning a variety of

Awards