Decrypting Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Fire Protection Analysis

Posted on Thursday, April 4th, 2013

Earlier this year, Phil Friday worked with Thunderhead Engineering’s Bryan Klein to pioneer a new IT strategy for running FDS and Smoke View in the Cloud. Thunderhead Engineering developed PyroSim, a graphical user interface for FDS file development. Together, we figured out how to outsource our fire protection analysis processing needs for PyroSim to Amazon...read the full article

Enhancing FDS Analysis

Posted on Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

New computing architectures allow sophisticated, powerful fire modeling simulations that are crucial for the future of fire safety.  However, the computing resources that are needed to use these tools has historically been prohibitive. Fire Dynamic Simulator Used for Forensic Analysis Two pieces of software, Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) and Smokeview (SMV), have been developed for...read the full article

Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and Smokeview (SMV) – Bringing Fire Analysis to Life

Posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

In the last 15 years, scientists and engineers have developed two powerful tools for fire modeling and visualizing the complex phenomenon that is fire: Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and Smokeview (SMV). Together, they can help answer questions, such as: would a resident or occupant have sufficient time to escape from a building in the event...read the full article

San Antonio Fire Investigation of Idle Plastic Pallet Fire Reveals Code Violations

Posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2012

An August 17th warehouse fire that burned for six hours is being investigated by the San Antonio Fire Department. The fire shot flames and smoke into the air in a warehouse that stored approximately 35,000 plastic pallets. While firefighters were on scene battling the 3-alarm fire, explosions could be heard, possibly from the transformers inside...read the full article

How Can Computer Fire Modeling Help Fight Fires?

Posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2012

Computer fire modeling uses complex mathematical tools to analyze the fire and life safety in buildings. Modern computer fire modeling is capable of many things, including: Predicting fire growth & behavior Evaluating occupant egress Analyzing smoke control systems Predicting detector actuation time Providing plausible post-fire timeline of events Fire modeling is particularly valuable when comparing...read the full article