Fire fighting

News and Updates

Draft California Fire Code Includes NIST Tool to Evaluate Wildfire Hazard

September 13, 2021

Severe wildfire disasters are often the product of numerous factors — vegetation, drought, a lack of firefighting resources, and many others — coalescing

Red fire extinguisher is attached to pipes and hoses inside a vehicle.

NIST Tool Will Help Military Vehicles Fight Fires Using Less Harmful Chemicals

March 2, 2021

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new, interactive spreadsheet that will help the U.S. military

New Timeline of Deadliest California Wildfire Could Guide Lifesaving Research and Action

February 8, 2021

On a brisk November morning in 2018, a fire sparked in a remote stretch of canyon in Butte County, California, a region nestled against the western slopes of

Industry Impacts

Photo of a burnt faceplate from a firefighter's gear

Firefighter Protective Equipment

Firefighters rely on self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBA) to protect them from dangerous heat and toxic smoke. NIST research helped to improve industry

Projects and Programs

High Temperature Performance of Fire Fighter Equipment

Ongoing

The performance of fire fighting equipment and gear is critical for the safety and effectiveness of fire fighters. Current equipment standards and test methods

Fire Risk Reduction in Buildings Program

Ongoing

The research in this program (Fire Risk Reduction in Buildings, FRRiB) will enable reductions in the two single largest components of this U.S. structure fire

Smart Fire Fighting

Ongoing

In 2011, the fire departments in the United States responded to more than 484,5001 structure fires. These fires resulted in approximately 2,640 civilian

Low Heat Release Upholstered Furniture

Ongoing

To reduce the flammability of residential upholstered furniture (RUF), the fire safety community has developed test methods and mitigation strategies based on

Publications

P-Flash – A Machine Learning-based Model for Flashover Prediction using Recovered Temperature Data

April 4, 2021

Author(s)

Jun Wang, Andy Tam, Youwei Jia, Richard Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Eugene Yujun Fu, Thomas Cleary

Research was conducted to examine the use of Support Vector Regression (SVR) to build a model to forecast the potential occurrence of flashover in a single

Predicting Flashover Occurrence using Surrogate Temperature Data

February 9, 2021

Author(s)

Andy Tam, Eugene Yujun Fu, Richard Peacock, Paul A. Reneke, Jun Wang, Grace Ngai, Hong Va Leong, Thomas Cleary

Fire fighter fatalities and injuries in the U.S. remain too high and fire fighting too hazardous. Until now, fire fighters rely only on their experience to

Time Series Feature Extraction and Selection Tool for Fire Data

September 15, 2020

Author(s)

Jun Wang, Youwei Jia, Eugene Yujun Fu, Jiajia Li, Andy Tam

This paper aims to facilitate the use of machine learning to carry out supervised classification/regression tasks for time series data in fire research

On the Use of Machine Learning Models to Forecast Flashover Occurrence in a Compartment

September 15, 2020

Author(s)

Jun Wang, Andy Tam, Paul A. Reneke, Richard Peacock, Thomas Cleary, Eugene Yujun Fu, Grace Ngai, Hong Va Leong

This paper presents a study to examine the potential use of machine learning algorithms to build a model to forecast the likelihood of flashover occurrence for

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

ToGS Turnout Gear Selector

Turnout Gear Selector (ToGS) helps the manufacturers, purchasers and users of fire turnout gear evaluate and select the turnout coat and pants ensemble that