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Enhanced Contract Site

General Technical Capabilities

HAI has an international reputation for excellence in fire protection R&D as well as application of advanced engineering methods to the solution of fire problems. HAI staff regularly publishes in the technical fire literature and participates in leadership roles in a wide range of professional organizations. HAI has a mix and depth of talent available in the identified functional areas to support a wide range of concurrent tasks. HAI has 130 employees, 90 of whom provide direct technical support on projects as envisioned in the SOW.

HAI has a 12,000 square foot laboratory facility at its corporate headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland. The facility includes bench hoods, a cone calorimeter, and two test enclosures. Instrumentation includes several continuous gas analyzers, an FTIR, a particle size analyzer (laser diffraction type), and a wide range of other fire instruments (smoke, flow, temperature, etc.). These facilities are also used to support the development of instrumentation packages for use in field testing. The Baltimore fire laboratory has multiple fire compartment test facilities that are used for a range of test and evaluation projects, including gaseous, dry powder and water fire suppression systems, various fire detection systems, and material testing. HAI maintains the capabilities to perform field testing with hundreds of data channels at field sites without reliance on on-site power. These capabilities have been used in four recent weapons effects tests on retired Naval ships.

HAI routinely applies advanced analytical methods towards design and analysis problems. HAI has capabilities to perform detailed simulations of fire dynamics, sprinkler dynamics, fire/smoke vent actuation, smoke spread, and conjugate heat transfer. Examples of our analytical tools include HEATING, a 3D heat conduction code which originates from Oak Ridge National Laboratory; the three-dimensional large eddy simulation computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code known as the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) which originates from the National Tnstitute of Standards and Technology (NTST) Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL); Fire and Smoke Simulator (FSSIM), an HAI-developed network fire model; and other fire models such as CONTAM and CFAST. Staff members have significant expertise both in the use and development of advanced computations tools.

HAI has substantial computer resources upon which to perform these numerical studies. Larger simulations can be performed on an 8 node cluster of Linux computers comprising of Pentium IV processors, each with 2 GB of memory and 700 GB of storage; a Linux workstation with two Pentium IV Xeon processors with 4 GB of memory and 120 GB of storage; and an SGT (formerly Silicon Graphics Inc.) Octane2 graphics workstation with V6(r) graphics, two R12,000A processors, 2 GB of RAM memory, and in excess of 136 GB of storage. Runs can also be done on several Pentium TV PCs with up to 2 GB of memory and in excess of 70 GB of storage disk space. HAI has several applications for two- and three-dimensional, quantitative analysis and animation of data.