Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is a

computational fluid dynamics Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required to simulate t ...

(CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow. The computer program solves numerically a

large eddy simulation Large eddy simulation (LES) is a mathematical model for turbulence used in computational fluid dynamics. It was initially proposed in 1963 by Joseph Smagorinsky to simulate atmospheric air currents, and first explored by Deardorff (1970). LES is ...

form of the

Navier–Stokes equations In physics, the Navier–Stokes equations ( ) are partial differential equations which describe the motion of viscous fluid substances, named after French engineer and physicist Claude-Louis Navier and Anglo-Irish physicist and mathematician G ...

appropriate Appropriate may refer to *Appropriate (play), a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Appropriation may refer to: *Appropriation (art) the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation *Appropriation (law) as a component of gove ...

for low-speed, thermally-driven flow, with an emphasis on smoke and heat transport from fires, to describe the evolution of fire. FDS is free software developed by the

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...

(NIST) of the

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, in cooperation with

VTT VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd is a state-owned and controlled non-profit limited liability company. VTT is the largest research and technology company and research centre conducting applied research in Finland. It provides resear ...

Technical Research Centre of Finland. Smokeview is the companion visualization program that can be used to display the output of FDS. The first version of FDS was publicly released in February 2000. To date, about half of the applications of the model have been for design of smoke handling systems and sprinkler/detector activation studies. The other half consist of residential and industrial fire reconstructions. Throughout its development, FDS has been aimed at solving practical fire problems in fire protection engineering, while at the same time providing a tool to study fundamental fire dynamics and combustion. The Wildland-Urban Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS) is an extension developed by the

US Forest Service The United States Forest Service (USFS) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that administers the nation's 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands. The Forest Service manages of land. Major divisions of the agency inc ...

that is integrated into FDS and allows it to be used for

wildfire modeling In computational science, wildfire modeling is concerned with numerical simulation of wildland fires in order to understand and predict fire behavior. Wildfire modeling can ultimately aid wildland fire suppression, namely increase safety of firef ...

. It models vegetative fuel either by explicitly defining the volume of the vegetation or, for surface fuels such as grass, by assuming uniform fuel at the air-ground boundary. FDS is a Fortran program that reads input parameters from a text file, computes a numerical solution to the governing equations, and writes user-specified output data to files. Smokeview is a companion program that reads FDS output files and produces animations on the computer screen. Smokeview has a simple menu-driven interface, while FDS does not. However, there are various third-party programs that have been developed to generate the text file containing the input parameters needed by FDS.

References

External links

FDS Official website

Google Discussion Group for Fire Dynamics Simulator and Smokeview

Wikibooks tutorial

FDS+Evac Tools

FDS Project Road Map

AutoCAD plugin to convert 3D geometry to FDS format

PyroSim, a graphical interface (GUI) for creation of FDS input files.
(commercial) * * Firefighting Fire prevention Fire protection Wildfire prevention {{engineering-stub

See also

References

External links