FDS-SMV 6.3.0 Release

Today we posted a new minor release of FDS and Smokeview, version 6.3.0.  Please visit the downloads page on the FDS-SMV website to download the bundle for your platform.

The changes made to FDS are in some ways quite minor and likely will not affect most users.  The two most important changes are (1) the heat release rate limiter has been removed from the combustion model and (2) new default values of radiative fraction have been assigned to select fuels (such as methane, which has a radiative fraction of approximately 0.2; a complete list is given in the FDS User Guide).

We have also implemented a multi-fuel model for the radiative fraction where we weight the local value by the reaction rate for each fuel.  Because of this change, the RADIATIVE_FRACTION input parameter has been moved from the RADI line to the REAC line.  This should be the only input parameter change required for this new version.

We realize there has been a lot of chatter on the discussion forum recently about running MPI on Windows machines.  Unfortunately, we have not been able to simplify this process as of yet.  Our best advice is contained in the wiki Running FDS MPI on Windows. Please let us know as soon as possible if you run into trouble with this latest release.  Issues may be submitted here.

GitHub pull requests are welcome!

This is the first release since our migration from Google Code to GitHub.  We have, I believe, managed to maintain a balance between the stability of our old Subversion workflow and the flexibility and power of a distributed Git workflow.  We have basically adopted what Atlassian refers to as the Forking Workflow [insert bad joke here].  Each project member "forks" the repository and sends pull requests to the project maintainer.  What this means is that YOUR workflow and MY workflow for FDS development are nearly identical---the only difference is that I can accept pull requests.  We hope this will take collaboration to a new level.

If you are new to Git, the following link may be helpful:

FDS-SMV Git User Workflow

What's on the horizon?

The migration from Google Code to GitHub was a fairly heavy lift.  But with this minor release we hope to be in a position in the coming year to focus on development of chemistry, complex geometry, and scalability for multi-mesh calculations.

Please continue to monitor progress on Issues you care about and present enhancement requests for features you feel would be helpful.