Munich, Germany, 21 June 2018: SimScale announced the launch of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) explorative preview programme, for modelling fire and smoke, in a Press communiqué.

Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) 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 communiqué said. Throughout its development, FDS has been aimed at solving practical fire problems in fire protection engineering, while providing a tool to study fundamental fire dynamics and combustion, the communiqué further said.

According to Simscale, the preview programme is a response to the request of many customers to combine 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 requests come from AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) companies working 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, the communiqué said.

David Heiny, CEO and Co-founder, SimScale, said: “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. 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.”

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