FDS Tutorial – Welcome

FDS Tutorial .com is a website that provides guides and tutorials for Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow.

The goal of FDS Tutorial is to provide beginners and intermediate FDS users with an easy to follow set of instructions and explanation that are not present in the official guides.

FDS Tutorials:

The tutorials of this website are divided into three categories:

Basic FDS Tutorials:

FDS Tutorials:

FDS Examples:

_____________________________

  • Basic FDS tutorials – these are meant for people who want to learn FDS but have never used it
  • FDS tutorials – these tutorial contain specific and detailed instructions for different subjects. If you are new to FDS you should fist check out the beginner tutorials for easier FDS simulations.
  • FDS examples – these are examples of FDS simulations. In these pages the input parameters of the simulation are expressed but not explained in detail (explanation is often not necessary for non-beginner users)

_____________________________

Even though the FDS tutorials presented in this website are quite detailed, for more complete information you should always check the FDS User Guide and the FDS Verification and Validations guides. (full tutorial list)

What is FDS?

Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow. The software solves numerically a form of the Navier-Stokes nist-equations appropriate for low-speed, thermally-driven flow, with an emphasis on smoke and heat transport from fires.

fds tutorial smokeview
Example of a FDS fire scenario rendered by Smokeview

Throughout its development, FDS has been aimed at solving practical fire problems in fire protection engineering, while at the same time providing a tool to study fundamental fire dynamics and combustion.

FDS is a program that reads input parameters from a text file, computes a numerical solution to the governing equations, and writes user-specified output data to files.

Smokeview is a companion program that reads FDS output files and produces animations on the computer screen.

Click here for more information on FDS

How can I get FDS?

FDS is free and you can download it here:
https://pages.nist.gov/fds-smv/downloads.html

FDS Cloud Computing

An FDS simulation requires a lot of computing power, and in the case of very large geometries or very long simulations, using your PC can be very limiting and not always the best solution.

A possible solution is to run FDS on a VPS (Virtual Private Server): in other words, you rent a server with a certain computational power and run the FDS simulations on it.

Click here to learn more about FDS cloud computing.

Learning FDS

Learning FDS can be difficult, but is very rewarding.

With the help of the FDS User Guide, our step-by-step tutorials and our FDS Examples you have everything you need to start creating your FDS simulations. Start your Fire Dynamics Simulator training from here!