The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), an explorative preview program, has been launched by SimScale, the provider of the world’s first cloud-based engineering simulation solution. The program is a solver developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) of the United States Department of Commerce, in cooperation with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

The aim of FDS is to solve practical fire problems in fire protection engineering, while at the same time providing a tool to study fundamental fire dynamics and combustion. FDS has been created as a response to many customers requesting a program that combines the maturity and reliability of FDS for modelling fire and smoke with the convenience and scalability of SimScale’s cloud-based simulation infrastructure.

Most of these customers include AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) companies that work on projects that require performance-based design, fire reconstruction, test planning, compliance with fire-related codes and standards, dispersion, calculation of smoke venting systems or indoor air quality.

“SimScale’s CFD capabilities that are in production today, along with its seamless deployment, collaboration functionality, and scalability, have made it the tool of choice for many AEC companies. SimScale already helps these companies—including ARUP, WSP, Aqseptence Group among others—tackle engineering projects in the space of thermal comfort, industrial ventilation, building wind loads and pedestrian comfort. The request from these customers to extend SimScale’s feature set to also cover fire and smoke scenarios seems like a natural next step for our development,” said David Heiny, CEO and co-founder of SimScale.

The FDS preview program will explore and validate an offering of a simple workflow-driven interface for quick and robust modeling and visualization of complex fire scenarios in buildings, particularly parking garages and tunnels. Interested engineers and companies can apply for the program giving them a chance to shape the future workflow and user interface of the FDS integration, while in the meantime having their fire management-related simulation projects solved by SimScale’s engineers.