Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Appeal for FDS/Smokeview References

Last summer, I broadcast a request to the FDS/SMV user community to send us references to journal articles that involved FDS verification or validation. We have literature survey sections in both the Verification and Validation volumes of the FDS Technical Reference Guide

http://fire.nist.gov/fds/documentation.html

that we would like to keep up to date.

Unfortunately, I received only 5 references in over a year, and 3 were from the same person! I'd like to repeat my appeal. Please understand that it is very important that we document FDS V&V work, both the work that we do ourselves and the work done by others. An added benefit is that these papers can help those who are just starting to use FDS understand capabilities and limitations.

For those who have published articles that involve FDS V&V, could you please do the following:

1. Scan the literature survey chapters of either the Verification or Validation Guide to see if your paper is referenced. If it is, please check the reference for accuracy. If it is not, then

2. Send us the reference. To save us some time, it would be very useful to send the reference in this form:

@ARTICLE{Hostikka:FSJ2006,
author = {Hostikka, S. and McGrattan, K.B.},
title = {{Numerical modeling of radiative heat ...}},
journal = {Fire Safety Journal},
year = {2006},
volume = {41},
pages = {76-86}}

We use LaTeX for our documents, and this is the standard format of a reference in the bibliographic database. Even if you do not know LaTeX, getting the information in something close to this format would be a big help.

3. Send an electronic copy of the article, if possible. We cannot post the article because of copyright issues, but it is nice to have the document on file. Plus, it will enable us to write a few sentences in the V&V Guides describing the work. If you could summarize the work in a few sentences, that would be a great help, too. We do not need too much detail. We only want to provide enough information so that the readers can find and read the paper themselves.

For articles that you think appropriate for the FDS Verification Guide, send the information to

randall.mcdermott@nist.gov

For Validation work:

kevin.mcgrattan@nist.gov

And let's not forget that Smokeview is subject to V&V too:

glenn.forney@nist.gov

Thanks!