Has it ever crossed your mind how would our discipline look like, if we did not have Fire Dynamics Simulator? Maybe you had an opportunity to discuss CFD with colleagues from other disciplines, to find their faces in shock and awe that the fire community actually has its own, FREE AND OPEN SOURCE, validated and fully recognized solver? A testimony to the impact of FDS may be the citation count on its user guide, which has recently exceeded 5.000 citations! The FDS code is something special and our little scientific community can feel proud that a tool of this magnitude was built just for us!

But it did not build itself. There is a history of giants paving the route with their low-Mach number approximation of Navier-Stokes. There is my today's guest - Dr Kevin McGrattan who saw the need and built the first iteration of FDS (and still leads its development 20 years later). And there is a team of brilliant scientists at NIST, VTT and other parts of the world, who shared this dream of a robust, open-access fire simulator, and volunteered their hard work into making this dream a reality.

In this podcast episode, we focus on the very early days of FDS (or even before it came to life). My mission was to learn how FDS was built, what the landscape looked like back then and how it was growing. When particular important sub-models came into existence and what triggered that. We also learn what were the goals for the tool development and how did they evolve over the years as the project got more and more serious.  You may be surprised by some very simple explanations beyond some very tough design decisions!

I hope you enjoy this episode. Please appreciate dr Kevin McGrattan and the hard work done at NIST, VTT and other places, that enabled us to have something really special. Our solver. Fine tuned for fire and open to all.

Learn more about FDS at the project website at NIST or the GitHub repository.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.