User's Guide for Smokeview Version 5: A Tool for Visualizing Fire Dynamics Simulation Data

by National Institute of Standards and Technology

Smokeview is a software tool designed to visualize numerical calculations generated by fire models such as the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow or CFAST, a zone fire model. Smokeview visualizes smoke and other attributes of the fire using traditional scientific methods such as displaying tracer particle flow, 2D or 3D shaded contours of gas flow data such as temperature and flow vectors showing flow direction and magnitude. Smokeview also visualizes fire attributes realistically so that one can experience the fire. This is done by displaying a series of partially transparent planes where the transparencies in each plane (at each grid node) are determined from soot densities computed by FDS. Smokeview also visualizes static data at particular times again using 2D or 3D contours of data such as temperature and flow vectors showing flow direction and magnitude. Smokeview and associated documentation for Windows, Linux and Mac/OSX may be downloaded from the web site . nist .gov/smokeview at no cost.

134 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2014