Fire Dynamics Simulator Releases Version 6.10
Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is a widely used computer fire modeling tool, provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that helps the fire safety community better understand fire dynamics problems and associated risks. FDS is a computational fluid dynamics model developed to predict smoke and heat transport from fires in the built environment. Key features of FDS are its fast computational speed and relatively modest requirements in terms of computational hardware, enabling fire protection engineers to quickly conduct computations.
Contributing to the Development of the Fire Dynamics Simulator
The Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), part of UL Research Institutes, supports the continued development of the FDS as a contributor to better serve the user community of fire protection engineers, fire researchers, and designers of life safety systems. On March 12, 2025, FDS version 6.10 was released, providing its users with new features, outputs, and bug fixes.
Improving User Experience with FDS 6.10.0
The latest FDS release expands user capabilities and improves user experience. New features include:
- Reduced cost of wall renoding during pyrolysis.
- Local control of the auto-ignition temperature (AIT)
- A new model for oxidative solid phase reactions that enforces consistency between the surface mass flux of oxygen and the rate of oxygen consumption in solid phase reactions.
- Addition of a heartbeat signal for external control of FDS.
- A new flux limiter correction enforces isothermal flow for multi-component transport of species with different molecular weights.
- SUNDIALS library is included to support detailed chemistry.
To see the full list of new features, bug fixes, and outputs, visit the FDS Release Notes.
“For users, the added capabilities for external control of FDS opens a lot of opportunities to account for the actions of occupants and building systems in a fire that might otherwise be challenging to implement purely by FDS inputs. For developers, the HYPRE and SUNDIALS additions will let us really push the boundary of what has been done with CFD fire models with the goal of improving predictions for routine engineering calculations.”
—Jason Floyd, principal research engineer, FSRI
