Links
Societies and Organizations:
- Society of Fire Protection Engineers
- SFPE UT Student Chapter
- SFPE WPI Student Chapter
- National Fire Protection Association
Fire Protection Engineering Resources:
- UT Fire Research Group at The University of Texas at Austin
- Fire Protection Engineering Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
- Fire Protection Engineering Technology at the University of Houston-Downtown
- Fire Protection Engineering Department at the University of Maryland
- Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
- Fire Science Tools – Teaching tools for fire and combustion science
Fire Modeling Resources:
- Fire Dynamics Simulator (maintained by NIST)
- CFAST Zone Model (maintained by NIST)
- BRANZFIRE Zone Model
People in FPE and Fire Research:
Projects I’m involved in:
- Fire Dynamics Simulator – A CFD model used for fire simulations
- BlenderFDS – A 3D geometry creation tool for FDS; implemented in Blender; coded in Python
- FDS Tools – web tools and misc. tools for FDS
- Spyder – A GUI for scientific/engineering use of Python/Scipy/Numpy
- Scipy/Numpy – scientific and numerical libraries for Python
Wildland Fire Resources:
- Is Texas On Fire? – Map of current Texas wildland fires, updated daily
- Texas Forest Service – Protecting and sustaining forests, trees, and related natural resources
- Wildland urban-interface Fire Dynamics Simulator – Physics-based wildland fire model
Journals and Periodicals:
- Fire Technology
- Fire Safety Journal
- Combustion and Flame
- Combustion Science and Technology
- Proceedings of the Combustion Institute
- Symposium (International) on Combustion
- Combustion, Explosion, and Shock Waves
- Flow, Turbulence, and Combustion
- Fire and Materials
- Journal of Computational Physics
Tools I use:
- Google!
- Google Mail
- Google Docs (Share and collaborate documents and spreadsheets online)
- Google Reader (the best RSS reader)
- Google Scholar (Scientific/academic paper search engine)
- Google Maps
- Google Calendar
- Science
- Python (Flexible programming language)
- SciPy (Scientific Python package)
- NumPy (Numerical Python package)
- Enthought Python Distribution (free scientific/computational Python distribution)
- Sage (Math/engineering/science tool)
- Spyder (Scientific/engineering GUI for Python)
- Papers (PDF organizer for scientific papers)
- GraphClick (Easy collection of data from plots and charts)
- LyX (LaTeX front-end)
- Bib-Desk (BibTeX reference manager)
- Other
Productivity / Life Hacks:
Additional Resources:
Security system and fire alarms
Are you in need of a security system or fire alarm in the Houston area? Visit OMNI Fire & Security Systems for local, better, and different type of alarm company founded by my father, Rick Overholt.
Web hosting
I use WebFaction for my web hosting. They offer very dependable and fast hosting, as well as the best customer support from a web host that I’ve ever experienced.