Release of FDS-SMV 5.4

We have posted a new "minor" release of FDS and Smokeview on the Downloads page. You can navigate there from the FDS/SMV homepage fire.nist.gov/fds. Remember that a "minor" release means that some features of FDS have changed, in particular the velocity boundary conditions and certain aspects of the solid phase pyrolysis model. The new FDS User's Guide, which comes with the Download, has more details.

Note that we have changed the installation process of FDS/Smokeview for Windows users. First, the new default installation folder is

C:\Program Files\FDS\FDS5

The purpose of this change is to enable us to start development of FDS 6 without having to overwrite current files. The other change in the installation process is that we are only using the program WinZip for the installation. WinZip has a nice feature which allows you to download files and unzip them into a given folder. It makes it easy for us to "bundle" the files needed for installation. A problem with past releases has been that we would release a "bundle" for every minor version of FDS, but then released separate executables for each maintenance release. We have found that many used the bundles only but did not update the maintenance releases. From now on, each new maintenance release will have all the necessary files for a full installation.

Note that as part of the new installation, there is a short program that will change the "path" variables to point at the new installation folder. Once you install the new version and restart your computer, the commands "fds5" and "smokeview" will now point to the new version, not the old. You can go back to an older version by just moving the appropriate executable from the old folder to the new. Whenever you type a command at the prompt, Windows searches through the path folders until it either finds or does not find the command. If something does not work properly, check your "Environment Variables", which can be found under "System Properties" --> "Advanced" on most Windows machines. I have found it useful to look at these "path" variables from time to time because many common software problems can be traced to bad path variables.

In the coming weeks, we will post additional information about the new release and features. For now, it would be useful to us if you could try installing the new version and reporting back to us via the Discussion Group any problems you encounter. The same is true for Mac and Linux users. The installation for these platforms is still basically a zip or "tar" file, but the new executables may or may not work properly because we have upgraded to Version 11 of the Intel Fortran compilers.