9616669 Barnett Recent advances in fire science and computer modeling of fires allow scientists to predict fire growth and spread through buildings and other structures. To date, little work has been done to develop the scientific basis for the methodologies and techniques necessary to allow the use of this technology for manual building-fire suppression. The objective of this study is to develop a prototype system consisting of a building-specific fire simulation database and real-time sensor queries to aid fire fighting efforts in building fires. The database will be constructed by using building fire field models based on computational fluid dynamics theory and zone models as appropriate. The result of this work will be a system whereby manual fire suppression activities will be optimized by an interaction with a building's thermal sensing system through the use of computer database and visualization technology. The results of this research will have wide-ranging applications and will form the basis for the development of new fire models and expert systems for building manual fire suppression activities. ***
