FDS Validation

[Kevin McGrattan <kevin.mcgrattan@nist.gov>]

All,

In recent years, many FDS users have asked for references to
validation work. Up to
now, we and others outside of NIST have published various
reports and papers in
journals and conference proceedings describing efforts to
validate FDS, but there 
has been no effort to compile all the work into one easily
accessible volume. Fortunately, with the support of the US
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we have contracted with
Combustion Science and Engineering of Columbia, Maryland to
expand
our FDS Technical Reference Guide to include a comprehensive
description of validation work performed to date. The
contract was awarded via a competitive bidding process
that took place over the last month. With the release of FDS
version 4, the Technical
Reference Guide will include sections on verification and
validation.

We'd like to request that anyone who has done validation
work with FDS, whether it
be published or unpublished, whether it was sponsored by
NIST or not, could you send
the paper or report to Erin Mack (emack@csefire.com). This
includes work done by
students, especially if it was linked to a NIST grant. We
have many of these reports
here obviously, but it would save us some time if you could
send a copy to Erin. That
way your work will be given proper credit. 

The time frame we have to work with is short. We hope to
have this work completed in
two months, so please send in the material now so that it
can be cited.


In other matters, we continue to make progress with the beta
test of version 4. Thanks
to all of you who have worked hard in the past few months to
work out some kinks.
Continue to send in the bugs. I put a new version of FDS up
on the FTP site this
week, so look for the January compile date if you want to
try out the new version.
Also, I have tried to make version 4 backwards compatible
with version 3, so your
version 3 input files should run in version 4. If it does
not, let me know.
We're looking at an official release of version 4 once the
validation work is completed, should be a few months.

Kevin


-- 
Kevin McGrattan
National Institute of Standards and Technology
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8663
Gaithersburg MD 20899-8663

Telephone: (301) 975 2712
FAX:       (301) 975 4052