Fire Dynamics and Fire Protection Engineering
Engineering Laboratory, Fire Research Division
NIST only participates in the February and August reviews.
An experimental and modeling program is underway to further the understanding of dynamic processes that occur in fires and to reduce the impact of fire on people, property, and the environment. Field and laboratory measurements of fire and fire protection engineering consider a wide range of fundamental and applied research issues associated with wildland-urban interface fires, structure fires, evacuation, fire service equipment and tactics, fire safe materials, and structural fire resistance. A variety of innovative measurements and models are being applied to study these phenomena. A recent emphasis has been the characterization of the structure of medium-scale pool fires to provide high quality data for validation of computational fire models including NIST's Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) software. Current research involves measurements of the heat and mass transfer processes in vegetative fuels under the influence of wind to support the development of fire models. A 2.4 m x 2.4 m cross section, 9 m long, wind tunnel is used to test the burning of single and multiple pieces of vegetaion.