I’ve posted a new web calculator tool related to structural fire safety to calculate the lumped temperature of steel under fire conditions. The tool has the ability to input parameters for steel, select a standard fire time-temperature curve (ISO or ASTM), and choose unprotected or protected steel. The tool is based on the equations from the textbook by A. Buchanan, Structural Design For Fire Safety, and is available here:

http://www.koverholt.com/transient-steel-heating-under-fire-conditions/

I hope you find the calculator useful, and I will continue to add web tools for fire protection engineering calculations. I will be adding a more detailed explanation and equations to the steel heating calculator page in the near future as well as releasing the source code.

Please let me know if you find any bugs, would like to give feedback on this tool, or have a request for another web calculator! The next web tool will be a calculator to give results from the Heskestad flame height and centerline temperatures.

Earlier today, the professor for my Combustion class mentioned that for our final project, we will be working on a problem that currently has no solution. This intrigued me of course, as I wondered if our final grades would have no solution as well. After he explained, it made all the more sense and reminded me why my love and passion is in the field of fire protection engineering, the school I go to, and the people I work with: they all heavily align with my values and principles of sharing knowledge and making information available to everyone, everywhere.

[From NASA]

So, let me explain his model simply by example:

The professor said that when he first started this class 2 years ago, the students were working on a different problem with no solution… at the time. The class worked together and in the end the results were so significant that a couple of students took the initiative to publish the results in a scientific journal. The same happened when the class was taught last year – project done, paper published.

So what does this mean and why do you care? Well, all too often in the academic world, people can get caught up in working on projects and sort of work themselves into a dark corner where nobody gets to benefit from the results… and this is done in real life as well, not just academics. This is where the ridiculous amount of collaborative technology available to us comes in to play. Want to gather up notes on the Smagorinsky constant and publish them for anyone to find who is searching for them in the next 1000 years? Easy: 5 minutes. Want to publish your results in the most useful way? Easy: work on an open source project in your area along with your research – or make your own.

…Or you could write a paper, finish your thesis work, wrap up the loose ends in a few years and show a flashy poster of your work 5 years after anybody cares about it anymore or thinks it to be useful.

I digress. I just wanted to stress this new method of collaboration that is among us, and how it’s going to change the way that we work together and grow together in fire protection engineering and fire science.

[From Rowan University College of Engineering]

Why not make use of motivated students and brainpower when they come together? Here is me welcoming this new phase of community and collaboration in a field that directly impacts life safety and makes safer buildings around the world. So when we work on that final project in a few weeks, it’s not really at all about a grade anymore – it’s about a new way of doing science – together.

Update: This is exactly the kind of stuff that I’m talking about here, posted today on the SFPE National blog that I set up a year ago – collaboration: Foundation Funded Research underway at WPI

WPI

Welp, I’ve been accepted to start my M.S. and eventually start my Ph.D. at Worcester Polytechnic Institute this fall! I will be studying fire protection engineering, a continuation of my bachelor’s degree. The school is populated with just under 4,000 students and it is a private engineering school. Not only does this school house one of the top fire protection engineering programs in the US, but the faculty and their work align closely with my values and passions in life.

The big move will look something like this in 8 weeks:

Some cool info about the school includes the fact that Robert Goddard went there and graduated in 1908 – he was the gradnfather of modern rocketry with the first liquid fueled rocket. Also, the fire protection engineering department has about 150 masters of science students and 4 (!) doctoral students. This is quite the opportunity I smell.

What I did during the summer of 2008

So far this summer I’m being funded by UHD as a last request to make a catalog of fire models for various textbooks. The work is very refreshing and I love to work when I learn much more than I expected. Another cool side effect of this work is that I can include the FDS models and example writeups on my website, free for anyone else in the world to see and learn from. The technical writeup is located here and it gets updated automatically anytime I change a single word in there. Eventually it will have links to FDS files for FDS users and students around the world to download and use on their own – I love technology.

FDS MESH Size Calculator tool

Finally, to finish off a nice post about fire protection engineering and FDS: I updated my FDS Mesh Size calculator on my other website to include some awesome and never-before-done functionality! It now takes in x, y, and z dimensions and an expected heat release rate and gives the user three MESH lines (coarse, moderate, and fine) to guide them on making an FDS file that has an adequately resolved MESH.

The tool can be found here on my FDS/sciency website and the nice folks at NIST gave me a link on their third-party tools page of the FDS website: http://fire.nist.gov/fds/thirdparty.html

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I know I post out-there stuff like this on my blog here sometimes, but this is what is on my mind and taking up my mental cycles and daily days. Jump in and read the linked pages or play with the tools of my creation!