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Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
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7
Building and Fire Research Laboratory

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

PANEL MEMBERS

Janet S.Baum, Health, Education & Research Associates, Inc., Chair

Robert A.Altenkirch, Mississippi State University, Vice Chair

Robert J.Asaro, University of California at San Diego

Craig L.Beyler, Hughes Associates, Inc.

Donald B.Bivens, DuPont Fluorochemicals

Randy R.Bruegman, Clackamas County Fire District #1, Oregon

Joseph P.Colaco, CBM Engineers, Inc.

James M.Delahay, Lane Bishop York Delahay, Inc.

Leon R.Glicksman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Eric R.Hansen, Eric Hansen Group

Susan D.Landry, Albemarle Corporation

Elaine S.Oran, Naval Research Laboratory

Richard E.Schuler, Cornell University

Jim W.Sealy, Architect, Building Code Consultant, Dallas, Texas

Miroslaw J.Skibniewski, Purdue University

Michael Winter, United Technologies Research Center

Elaine M.Yorkgitis, Automotive Division/3M

Submitted for the panel by its Chair, Janet S.Baum, and its Vice Chair, Robert A.Altenkirch, this assessment of the fiscal year 2001 activities of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory is based on site visits by individual panel members, a formal meeting of the panel on March 1–2, 2001, in Gaithersburg, Md., and materials provided by the laboratory.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

LABORATORY-LEVEL REVIEW

Technical Merit

According to laboratory documentation, the mission of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL) is to meet the measurement and standards needs of the building and fire safety communities.

In support of this appropriate mission statement, the Building and Fire Research Laboratory has recently defined four overall “goals,” or areas of activity, each of which is the responsibility of one division:

These are appropriate areas of activity for the laboratory, and the panel believes that the laboratory, by producing results in these areas, can make a difference for the building and fire safety communities. However, the panel is concerned that three times in the last 5 years a new set of overall laboratory objectives has been introduced. While evolution is healthy, constant change at the highest level is unsettling. The lack of a constant and coherent summary of the laboratory’s overall goals can be expected to confuse both laboratory staff and their customers and also makes it difficult for the panel to assess the long-term progress of the laboratory.

The Building and Fire Research Laboratory must develop a 5-year strategic plan that should be presented to the panel at its next meeting in March 2002. The process of laying out a coherent, long-term strategy for the laboratory is complicated but necessary, and laboratory management should seek assistance and input from a variety of sources. Professional facilitators with experience in the process should be brought in from the outside. Technical input from customers and potential customers should be solicited to help determine their priorities and what types of results are most likely to be implemented by industry. Finally, the expertise of the laboratory’s junior and senior technical staff should be tapped; they are familiar with cutting-edge technologies and attuned to the activities of the external communities, and the reactions of these communities to NIST efforts. The panel recommends that the laboratory develop a strategic plan for a variety of reasons, but the key benefits would be having a coherent and stable definition of goals and programs through which the laboratory could effectively establish an organizational culture internally and present a consistent face externally. The plan, and the process of determining the plan, could also help resolve internal uncertainties about the laboratory’s future and the direction of individual projects and programs.

The current goals map one-to-one with the laboratory’s divisions. This approach may be the easiest way to manage the programs, but it is important not to lose sight of potential cross-divisional synergies or opportunities for collaborations. Regardless of how the laboratory’s specific goals are defined or organized, the panel observes that strong relationships among staff throughout the laboratory are essential. The laboratory should consider various mechanisms to allow the technical staff, especially the more junior staff, to gain familiarity with staff and projects from groups and divisions outside their area. For example, informal events that would allow staff to meet each other or internal seminars about ongoing or proposed activities are both ways to increase cross-fertilization and build a more unified culture within the laboratory. Awareness of what is occurring in other divisions will help people know where to go for advice or get ideas for cooperative projects, and informal relationships will lay the

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

FIGURE 7.1 Organizational structure of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory. Listed under each division are the division’s groups.

groundwork for future collaborations built on familiarity and trust. The panel observed that several of the divisional-level themes, such as service life prediction, life-cycle costs, and durability, certainly could be related, but it was not clear if a unified approach to these questions was being taken across the laboratory or whose responsibility it was to make sure that the activities are interwoven when appropriate.

The Building and Fire Research Laboratory is organized into four divisions: Structures, Building Materials, Building Environment, and Fire Research (see Figure 7.1). Technical work is also under way in the laboratory office on a variety of activities, mainly in the Office of Applied Economics. All of these units are discussed in detail in the divisional reports in the remainder of this chapter. The Fire Research Division is new this year, the product of a merger of the former Fire Safety Engineering Division and the Fire Science Division. The panel applauds this reorganization and believes that the unification of these two groups has positively affected morale, collaborative efforts, and financial stability within the laboratory’s fire programs. The process of combining the units is not yet complete, and continued efforts are needed to ensure that the new division’s goals are defined and understood, fiscal and human resources are appropriately allocated, and an identifiable culture is established.

As in the past, the panel continues to be impressed with the technical quality of the staff and the individual projects under way in the laboratory. In the Structures Division, good progress is being made in the work on high-performance concrete and the collaborative effort in wind engineering with Texas Tech University. In the Building Materials Division, getting the integrating sphere up and running was a significant achievement, and the projects on microstructural understanding of interfacial and interphasal phenomena and appearance performance and durability issues are very impressive. In the Building

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

Environment Division, staff are producing useful standards and tools, such as the Building Automation and Control network (BACnet) and the CYCLE D and REFLEAK software for the alternative refrigerants program, and are also performing research on technologies with broader applications, as in the MEMS project. In the new Fire Research Division, the tradition of innovative approaches to fire modeling and test method development continues, and work on polymer nanocomposites is effectively exploring technologies to improve flame-retardant materials. In the Office of Applied Economics, a recent accomplishment is the extension of a software tool that supports code compliance to applications beyond the original one— health-care facilities—to correctional facilities and other special-use buildings.

Program Relevance and Effectiveness

The Building and Fire Research Laboratory supports a diverse array of customers including the construction industry, materials producers, and the fire service community. Relevant NIST products include software packages to enable external use of NIST models, new measurement methods and technologies, and basic research that enables the development of advanced materials. The varied portfolio of software available from the laboratory is impressive. Examples are fire simulations at multiple scales, models of air flow within buildings, simulations of concrete tests, and decisionmaking tools based on life-cycle costs. Measurement-related activities often link data collection to the development and verification of models or standards, as in the wind engineering efforts and the fire testing; in some cases, the relevant measurements cannot even be performed until NIST staff develop and demonstrate necessary new technologies, like the integrating sphere and the new thermal conductivity facility. In its research on advanced materials, the laboratory is ideally positioned to connect work on understanding fundamental phenomena or characterizing materials with efforts to encourage utilization of these materials in actual construction or commercial products. Ongoing projects of this type include work on fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites and polymer nanocomposites. The laboratory makes an effort to disseminate results and information about its products widely, and staff publish articles and technical reports, deliver presentations at workshops, organize meetings and consortia, participate in standards and codes organizations, and work closely with individual companies on adoption of new technologies.

As noted in the preceding section, the scientific merit of the work under way in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory is first rate, and the products and results provided to industry are therefore of high technical quality. However, any efforts to ensure that laboratory programs are relevant and effective must start with understanding what customers need and how NIST programs and results will be used. The laboratory is reaching out to the relevant communities, but input must be evaluated carefully as projects are being chosen and technical strategies mapped out. For a laboratory program to have an impact, staff must understand at the start of the effort who the audience for the work is and what implementation mechanisms will be used. In some cases, like programs undertaken for a consortium or for another government agency, the customers for the NIST work may be obvious and the immediate utilization of NIST results, at least by these customers, may be relied upon. However, even in these cases, the laboratory should still consider whether the work has broader applications and how and if the laboratory’s greater customer community might benefit. Thorough consideration of the potential impact of projects and careful planning of effective dissemination routes will help maximize the return on NIST’s efforts and perhaps help determine when organizing a consortium or accepting external funding is most appropriate and productive.

An area in which the Building and Fire Research Laboratory is uniquely qualified to provide much-needed results to industry is standards and codes. The U.S. standards and codes development process

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

relies on committees of experts drawn from various construction and design companies, and the process is both technical and political. This system can favor the status quo and has the potential to impede the adoption of advanced technologies. In some cases, the current regulations governing design and construction in the United States simply do not reflect the most up-to-date understanding of material properties and safety issues. Improving the technical input to the standards and codes development process is important, and the Building and Fire Research Laboratory can help provide scientific data and expertise on the materials or techniques being regulated. With this technical information, code makers would be better equipped to make rational decisions and produce science-based standards, and thus the U.S. standards and codes system would certainly be improved, and U.S. industry’s competitiveness in an increasingly global market would be enhanced. There could also be significant public benefit from facilitating the access of U.S. businesses and homeowners to new technologies with improved safety and sustainability features.

Standards and codes determine how building design and construction are done in this country. To ensure that its technical results will have a broad impact on U.S. industry and quality of life, the Building and Fire Research Laboratory understands how and where codes are limiting progress (or not limiting progress) and then must plan strategically. Surveying the status of standards and codes in a variety of areas would help the laboratory to pinpoint areas in which increasing the access to and quality of scientific information might make a significant difference and to identify individuals who might be champions for change in their respective areas. This analysis of the current status of standards and codes would help the laboratory to select projects with the greatest likelihood of impact and, if potential partners are identified early, would help staff to build relationships with advocates from the beginning of a project. By reaching out to members from the design and construction industries whose views and activities carry weight in the codes- and standards-setting processes, NIST could convince key players of the benefits of change. The laboratory would then be responsible for providing the technical results and tools needed to support scientific approaches to updating old standards and setting new ones. While it is important for NIST to have a realistic view of the obstacles to changing codes and standards, it is also essential that the Building and Fire Research Laboratory provide U.S. industry with the technical leadership it needs to implement modern technologies effectively.

Partnering with others might also be a useful approach to expanding the reach of some of the laboratory’s more fundamental research projects. BFRL might consider exploring cross-laboratory alliances within NIST. Certain laboratory programs, such as the information technology-related work and the MEMS efforts, are in cutting-edge fields that have been receiving a great deal of attention lately in industry and the media. Yet because of the laboratory’s focus on the construction and fire communities, which do not have a tradition of embracing new technologies, the laboratory is not being recognized for its contributions to these cutting-edge areas. Working with other NIST laboratories on product development and joint strategies to ensure that NIST work has an impact on larger communities may be a way to expand the reach and reputation of the Building and Fire Research Laboratories efforts in these areas.

Laboratory Resources

Funding sources for the Building and Fire Research Laboratory are shown in Table 7.1. As of January 2001, staffing for the Building and Fire Research Laboratory included 150 full-time permanent positions, of which 126 were for technical professionals. There were also 26 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.

The Building and Fire Research Laboratory receives a significant amount of funding from external

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

TABLE 7.1 Sources of Funding for the Building and Fire Research Laboratory (in millions of dollars), FY 1998 to FY 2001

Source of Funding

Fiscal Year 1998 (actual)

Fiscal Year 1999 (actual)

Fiscal Year 2000 (actual)

Fiscal Year 2001 (estimated)

NIST-STRS, excluding Competence

16.3

16.4

16.6

19.2

Competence

0.4

0.4

0.2

0.2

STRS, nonbase

2.5

1.8

1.5

1.7

ATP

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

MEPa

0.1

0.2

0.1

0.0

Measurement Services (SRM production)

0.0

0.0

0.0

0.0

OA/NFG/CRADA

8.9

9.2

11.2

11.4

Other Reimbursable

0.2

0.1

0.2

0.1

Total

28.9

28.7

30.5

33.4

Full-time permanent staff (total)b

161

157

157

150

NOTE: Funding for the NIST Measurement and Standards Laboratories comes from a variety of sources. The laboratories receive appropriations from Congress, known as Scientific and Technical Research and Services (STRS) funding. Competence funding also comes from NIST’s congressional appropriations but is allocated by the NIST director’s office in multiyear grants for projects that advance NIST’s capabilities in new and emerging areas of measurement science. Advanced Technology Program (ATP) funding reflects support from NIST’s ATP for work done at the NIST laboratories in collaboration with or in support of ATP projects. Funding to support production of Standard Reference Materials (SRMs) is tied to the use of such products and is classified as Measurement Services. NIST laboratories also receive funding through grants or contracts from other government agencies (OA), from nonfederal government (NFG) agencies, and from industry in the form of Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). All other laboratory funding, including that for Calibration Services, is grouped under “Other Reimbursable.”

aManufacturing Extension Partnership.

bThe number of full-time permanent staff is as of January of that fiscal year.

sources. The panel considered the appropriateness of this situation in light of how it affects the laboratory’s overall balance of programs between projects that aim to provide products immediately and longer-term efforts. It is certainly important for the laboratory to have a mix of activities, but decisions about what the balance should be and which areas are most appropriate for short- and long-term work ought to be made by NIST and based on overall laboratory goals. The balance should not be determined directly by the requests of other agencies or even industry for projects for which they are willing to pay. As the percentage of the laboratory’s budget derived from external organizations continues to grow (from 29 percent in fiscal year 1997 to 37 percent in fiscal year 2000), the laboratory is in danger of becoming a collection of researchers whose priorities are set by the needs of their funding sources.

In fiscal year 1997, BFRL’s internal funding (STRS) was $20.1 million and the number of full-time permanent staff was 177. In fiscal year 1998, the internal funding was cut to $16.3 million. The panel recognizes that this cutback has put the laboratory in a difficult situation, and the past several years have been characterized by increasing pressure to secure money from outside NIST to maintain programs and especially to cover the salaries of permanent staff members. The crisis seems to have eased somewhat

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

this year, with a $2.6 million increase in STRS funding (this includes about $1.2 million specifically designated for fire-related activities). Also, since fiscal year 1997, the number of full-time permanent staff has dropped 15 percent, to 150, which also reduces the pressure to find external support. The situation no longer appears to be desperate, so the panel believes that it is an ideal time for the laboratory to systematically consider the issues related to external funding in BFRL and determine a policy that will strengthen the laboratory’s programs and perhaps prevent future crises. Outside money has benefits (such as the guarantee of intellectual buy-in to NIST results by the companies and other agencies supporting the work) and costs (such as the loss of control that occurs when the laboratory accepts projects peripheral to its mission), and the laboratory must find an appropriate balance. One key step is setting criteria to determine whether an opportunity for external support should be pursued. Several questions might be asked. What will be the impact of the work on the agency or organization providing the funding? Will the results produced have scientific value and impact BFRL’s broader customer communities? Are important and challenging intellectual questions being asked? Would the project build critical technical expertise in the staff? Does it support the laboratory mission and goals? How large is the project and the funding? Currently, the panel is concerned because it appears that decisions about external money are largely based on each year’s budget situation rather than on fundamental criteria. Which types of external money are good or which types are bad does not seem to have been communicated to the staff; instead there is just a sense of urgency and fiscal uncertainty. If clear criteria for externally supported projects could be established and realistic targets for percentage of external support set for various laboratory programs, laboratory staff would be in a better position to seek out and utilize appropriate external funding.

One of the most serious potential downsides to external money is its unreliability, the inherently short-term nature of most of the grants and contracts the laboratory receives. Given this characteristic, it is very dangerous to fund permanent staff from these sources or have achieving core laboratory goals and milestones entirely dependent on them. Once the laboratory has determined how much external support it can reasonably allow and for which sort of activities these funds will be used, then management should seek out more flexible approaches to allocating resources and supporting programs across BFRL. If laboratory-level management is in a position to provide internal support to tide projects and personnel over between external funding opportunities, then individual divisions or groups will not have to seek and accept external funds indiscriminately to cover short-term shortfalls.

Another important element that would help the Building and Fire Research Laboratory control the type and amount of external funds accepted is the ability to adjust staffing levels in response to temporary fluctuations in total laboratory funding. Using guest researchers from industry and other agencies, postdoctoral associates, interns, students, term researchers, and other temporary appointments has several benefits. One is obviously the flexibility: All of these people can bring new expertise to the laboratory and can fill specific needs associated with individual projects without putting long-term pressure on the laboratory’s budget. Another benefit is that having people spend time at NIST is an important and effective recruiting tool for the laboratory. Familiarity with the people, work environment, and facilities often is a key factor in people’s decisions to come to NIST on a more permanent basis because the salaries offered by the U.S. government are often not competitive with industrial or even academic offers. Term appointments may also be the most efficient way to utilize non-American citizens with the expertise needed for some understaffed but essential laboratory programs, such as the work on construction automation and integration.

As discussed in last year’s report, the Building and Fire Research Laboratory is exploring the establishment of a formal and permanent relationship with the Federal Emergency Management

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

Agency (FEMA), in which NIST would officially be responsible (and funded) for providing research elements to support FEMA’s activities. Progress on this effort was delayed due to the change in administration, and the panel strongly encourages the laboratory to persist in its efforts to establish an expanded and formal relationship with FEMA. If such a partnership could be put into place, it would provide the laboratory with a steady source of funding for activities that are clearly consistent with NIST’s mission. In addition, FEMA’s disaster mitigation mission is such that working on programs in support of that agency might help the laboratory bridge the gap between its building and fire programs.

The facilities situation in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory continues to improve, but key issues remain. Specific questions related to the large-scale testing machine managed by the Structures Division, the large environmental chamber used by the Building Environment Division, and the large fire testing facility run by the Fire Research Division are discussed in detail in the divisional reports that follow. However, one significant problem related to the maintenance and operation of existing equipment was observed throughout the laboratory: The number of technicians is decreasing, owing to the laboratory’s tendency to replace departing technicians with professional staff. As a result, many jobs that should be done by technicians are falling to junior technical staff, coops, or interns, and this approach is not effective. In the long term, the equipment would run more smoothly and the time of professional staff would be used more effectively and efficiently if qualified people were hired to run the instruments.

During its visit to the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, the panel spoke with staff members without management present in “skip-level” meetings. A number of points were raised that the panel felt should be brought to management’s attention. First is that morale and mentoring deserve to be the focus of efforts throughout the laboratory. For example, mentoring of junior staff could productively include sharing of information about staff development opportunities and communication about how the laboratory and NIST function. Junior staff felt that established personnel could be more welcoming and inclusive; the panel noticed that this was a particular issue for women staff members as the senior staff and management are entirely men. Involving the newer personnel in laboratory decisionmaking processes, perhaps through a junior staff advisory board, might increase their understanding of how the laboratory works and provide a different perspective for management. Their input might be particularly valuable on one of the laboratory’s key challenges discussed earlier: establishing a unified culture within the laboratory and creating an environment in which strong informal relationships between staff from different divisions can grow and flourish, particularly across the building/ fire divide.

Staff at all levels noticed that members of management were endeavoring to improve their communications skills, and the panel commends the laboratory for providing training and support for such efforts. There is still room for improvement in this area; past issues, such as last year’s planned reductions in force (RIFs) in the Structures Division, still significantly affect current morale. Management should recognize that some work is still needed to rebuild confidence and a sense of security among laboratory personnel. Although no RIFs were scheduled for this year, the number one concern of staff members continues to be financial stability. While they realize that external support is necessary to allow the laboratory to engage in a broad array of activities, they are still made uneasy by a sense that the quality and general relevance of some of the contract work that has been taken on is a step below that of the usual NIST efforts. Even with (and perhaps because) of the externally funded work, laboratory personnel are stretched very thin, and they have little time to consider larger programmatic questions and think about the future of their fields at NIST and in general.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

DIVISIONAL REVIEWS

Structures Division

Technical Merit

According to division documentation, the mission of the Structures Division is to promote construction productivity and structural safety by providing measurement and standards to support the design, construction, and serviceability of constructed facilities.

Consistent with this mission, the Structures Division is responsible for the BFRL’s work on Advanced Construction Technology, which comprises two elements: structural performance prediction and construction integration and automation. The panel is pleased to report that the division is tightening its focus and appears to be in the process of realigning projects and resources to better support overall laboratory objectives. The number of projects is being reduced.

In the spring of 2001, the panel was presented with a series of objectives for the laboratory’s work in Advanced Construction Technology. While the objectives were in appropriate areas, such as the reduction of life-cycle costs, the panel believed that the role of the Structures Division in meeting these objectives was not clear and that quantifiable overall targets either were not cited or were unrealistic. Management should review the objectives of this program with the aim of defining realistic, achievable goals and determining what reasonable steps NIST should be taking in order to meet these goals. Having clear, tangible objectives that depend on the division realizing a series of feasibly attainable results would have two benefits. First, within NIST, it would provide focus for the projects and would increase understanding by both NIST-level management and by the technical staff of the laboratory’s overall strategy in this area. Second, presentations with realistic goals and deliverables would increase NIST’s credibility in external communities.

The division is organized into three groups: Structural Evaluation and Standards, Structural Systems and Design, and Construction Metrology and Automation. The first two support the structural performance prediction element of the laboratory’s work in Advanced Construction Technology, while the last group is responsible for the construction integration and automation element. Overall, the panel finds that the technical merit of the programs and projects remains consistently high. Below, each group is discussed.

The Structural Evaluation and Standards Group is focused on four projects in innovative construction systems, including work on high-performance concrete (HPC) and fiber-reinforced polymer composites. The panel was particularly impressed by the progress that has been made in the concrete area; ongoing efforts include looking at the fire performance of this type of material and investigating its use in residential and low-rise construction. In the specific area of curing of HPC, the panel believes that the division’s efforts should be wrapped up; the important remaining step is to find a way to disseminate NIST results in this area as a product that industry can use.

The Structural Systems and Design Group works on a wide variety of projects contributing to the division’s study of structural safety under extreme loads. The division’s collaborative work with Texas Tech University on building envelope testing under extreme artificial winds and on next-generation standards for wind loads is managed within this group, and the panel is pleased to see progress on the wind engineering efforts. A concern is the resources and focus of work related to structural performance of housing systems. As the status of the Standard and Codes Services unit of the laboratory office has been uncertain since the departure of the key staff member in mid-2000, the direction for this project has become unclear and funding has been reduced. To have an impact, the group should focus on next-generation housing systems.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

The Construction Metrology and Automation Group consists of four coordinated projects in support of construction integration and automation technology. The strategy is to develop products like performance measures, information protocols, and measurement-based performance criteria to reduce cycle times and life-cycle costs for construction projects. The objectives and the projects of the group are ambitious and are largely derived from the past experiences and technical strengths of the staff. The ongoing projects are intertwined, with some overlap in terms of the technical personnel involved and the core technologies being explored and integrated. A major accomplishment of the past year was the group’s success in increasing ties with external organizations, as discussed further in the next section.

The work in this group is closely related to the efforts of the Computer-Integrated Construction Group in the Building Environment Division. This group’s projects on developing standard protocols for transmission of construction metrology data and integrating and automating project information are key elements of the Construction Metrology and Automation Group’s work on reduced cycle time for construction. The objectives of these groups coincide, and the panel has observed considerable, although not entirely seamless, coordination of efforts to produce the key deliverables. The panel continues to be deeply concerned that two groups whose technical research is so closely related continue to operate within different divisions. The only apparent reason for this separation is the traditional internal structure of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory. The interdisciplinary nature of this work requires that human and fiscal resources be able to move freely to areas in which they are most needed and that the correct expertise can be efficiently assigned to tackle the various relevant problems. Currently, both groups are severely understaffed, which jeopardizes timely delivery of some of the technical products.

Program Relevance and Effectiveness

The primary customer of the Structures Division is the construction industry. This diverse collection of companies has a wide array of sometimes conflicting goals and certainly has more needs than the division, with its limited resources and reach, can possibly hope to address comprehensively. Therefore, it is critical for the division to make careful decisions about the issues it does choose to tackle and to plan carefully how to maximize the impact of its results. While the industry has produced a number of roadmaps and other documents outlining various long-term goals and objectives, these are not necessarily the best materials for the division to rely on when making tough choices. Direct contact, perhaps through workshops, with people from construction companies and their suppliers is probably the most effective way to gather input. These contacts are useful not only when deciding on new areas of endeavor but also for keeping everyone up to date on current programs and for disseminating results. Another option is establishing a standing advisory committee with industrial representatives to provide guidance to the division. The overall relevance of the division’s portfolio of projects is improving, but, in general, the panel believed that further definition and enhancement of the mechanisms for communicating NIST findings and products and encouraging industrial implementation of NIST results are needed.

The building industry is heavily affected by codes and standards, so a key element of Building and Fire Research Laboratory activities is technical work in support of the development of and compliance with codes and standards as well as participation in the committees and projects of codes and standards organizations. The panel recognizes that NIST staff are not responsible for determining what the codes and standards will be, as the industry controls this process. However, the laboratory is in a position to provide the measurement methods and data needed to support a scientific approach to developing and using modern codes and standards. When selecting and beginning projects, the Structures Division

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

should be considering whether there is a way in which NIST products can be utilized in codes and standards development and who will advocate the implementation of these technical results. For example, the division should be investigating how its work on the fire performance of HPC can support an effort to revise building codes on the fire ratings of structures.

In the construction integration and automation area, the panel is pleased to see that the laboratory’s activities have attracted considerable attention from external partners, including other government agencies, professional associations, and private industry. The growing connections to outside entities are based on publications, workshops, and other such events, which are attracting the attention of more industry and government organizations and educating them about the laboratory’s accomplishments and potential future NIST activities. One example of successful outreach by the Building and Fire Research Laboratory was the organization, with the Construction Industry Institute, of the Fully Integrated and Automated Technology (FIATECH) Consortium, which connects NIST to a wide array of companies. NIST is also involved with other consortia (e.g., the Plant STEP Consortium) and a number of professional organizations (e.g., the Automatic Identification Manufacturers Association, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the American Institute of Architects). In June 2000, the Office of Applied Economics produced a comprehensive report on the benefits and costs of research in integration and automation technologies for industrial facilities, and in July, the laboratory, with Carnegie Mellon University, conducted a workshop on automation technologies for construction, field measurement, and inspection. These efforts were supported by technical papers in leading research journals and presentations at important technical conferences.

Division Resources

Funding sources for the Structures Division are shown in Table 7.2. As of January 2001, staffing for the Structures Division included 20 full-time permanent positions, of which 17 were for technical professionals. There were also 5 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.

TABLE 7.2 Sources of Funding for the Structures Division (in millions of dollars), FY 1998 to FY 2001

Source of Funding

Fiscal Year 1998 (actual)

Fiscal Year 1999 (actual)

Fiscal Year 2000 (actual)

Fiscal Year 2001 (estimated)

NIST-STRS, excluding Competence

2.3

3.1

2.8

3.2

STRS, nonbase

0.6

0.4

0.0

0.0

ATP

0.0

0.1

0.1

0.1

OA/NFG/CRADA

0.5

0.3

0.5

0.9

Total

3.4

3.9

3.4

4.2

Full-time permanent staff (total)a

20

21

20

20

NOTE: Sources of funding are as described in the note accompanying Table 7.1.

aThe number of full-time permanent staff is as of January of that fiscal year.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

Last year, the Structures Division faced a serious crisis in its ability to support its programs and personnel. RIFs were planned. Division management and technical staff responded to this situation by dramatically increasing external funding, from about $300,000 in fiscal year 1999 to an estimated $900,000 (and possibly more) in fiscal year 2001. Thanks to these efforts and some reassignments, the division was able to survive the crisis; there were no RIFs, and the high-quality personnel in the division were retained. The panel commends the entire division for the efforts. External support comes from a variety of agencies, including FEMA, DOE, the General Services Administration, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the shift in focus of division programs to more closely align with the concerns of external groups has been a significant factor in allowing NIST to access funds from these other agencies. There are still some areas of concern, such as the fact that postdisaster investigations continue to be an unfunded mandate, but overall the panel feels that the division is on the right track and has taken good and important steps toward preventing recurrences of last year’s somewhat desperate situation.

While the funding situation appears to have stabilized, there are lingering effects from the crisis, particularly on morale. The key issue appears to be communication between management and staff. Since RIFs were announced before being rescinded, which programs and personnel would have been terminated was known, and there is a sense that the rationale for choosing those areas was never adequately explained. Laboratory and division management are trying to improve communication skills, and progress has been observed, but this is an area in which constant attention is needed, and the panel encourages continued efforts to bridge any communications gaps and rebuild the morale of the division.

While the division is healthier than in the past, many years of fiscal pressures have resulted in ongoing problems related to personnel levels and facilities. In some projects, the division is falling behind owing to manpower shortages, and to accomplish their goals, additional expertise and staffing are needed. According to the division, a wind engineer, a mechanical engineer with robotic experience, a computer scientist/programmer, and a mathematician with object recognition skills are the immediate priorities for current recruiting efforts. The last three positions are for support of the construction integration and automation program, where the division is significantly understaffed and current personnel are stretched very thin. The panel notes that the projects on curing of HPC and on structural performance of housing systems are also being impeded by personnel and funding shortages. While turnover has been relatively low in the division, salaries paid by NIST are not competitive with those paid by other organizations for people who possess the skills appropriate for NIST projects, and hiring such people will be a significant challenge for the division.

The division has two pieces of large capital equipment, the universal testing machine (UTM) and the tridirectional testing facility (TTF). Capital funding will be needed to repair and improve these machines if they are to be viable as national resources and to attract users. The UTM, at least, is functional at the moment, and NIST had the Applied Technology Council put together a report on what further steps would need to be taken to make it a useful facility and on whether a user community existed for this 53-MN large-scale testing facility.1 The report says that a similar machine exists at Lehigh University and is used regularly, so if firm commitments of support can be made by NIST management and external agencies and organizations, then the NIST instrument should be upgraded and can be expected to be employed for a variety of applications. The panel and the report agree that, if the decision is made

1  

Applied Technology Council, Assessment of the NIST 12-million-pound (53 MN) large-scale testing facility, ATC-53, Applied Technology Council, Redwood City, Calif., November 2000.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

to invest in the equipment, specialized personnel will need to be hired to run and maintain these machines.

Building Materials Division

Technical Merit

According to division documentation, the mission of the Building Materials Division is to provide the means for evaluating and predicting the service life performance and behavior of next-generation construction materials.

This is a unique mission, and the division provides a valuable service to industry and the public by focusing on materials systems not otherwise adequately studied and on the development of fundamental knowledge and test methods upon which new, vitally needed standards can be based. The programs addressing these goals are very well focused, and the division has a strong staff working on well-thought-out experiments. The establishment of clear objectives for the division is encouraging the researchers to act as a team, and the panel observed considerable cross-fertilization of ideas producing unique experimental approaches and new applications of existing techniques.

The technical merit of the Building Materials Division program is very high. Overall, projects in this division are making great contributions to the laboratory’s efforts to support the building and construction industries. The division is responsible for the Building and Fire Research Laboratory’s work on high-performance building materials. In support of this effort, the Inorganic Materials Group coordinates HYPERCON, which is aimed at measuring, understanding, and predicting the performance of high-performance concrete, and the Organic Materials Group manages the program on service life prediction of polymeric building materials, which works on similar tasks for organic building materials, with an emphasis on coatings, composites, and sealants. Also in this division is the Construction Materials Reference Laboratories group, which operates the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Materials Reference Laboratory and the American Society for Testing and Materials Cement and Concrete Reference Laboratory.

In the Inorganic Materials Group, the focus is on understanding the fundamentals of HPC in both the liquid and cured solid states, and clear objectives have been defined. A key achievement of the past year was the launching of Version 1.0 of the Virtual Cement and Concrete Testing Laboratory (VCCTL), which is now available on the Internet.2 This software is based on over a decade of sophisticated and well-directed NIST research that has established the division’s reputation as the home of the best concrete-related computational materials science. As the Building Materials Division expands the capabilities of the VCCTL, it is conceivable that any or all of the division’s wide array of work on cement and concrete could be incorporated into this software.

One ongoing project that may be applicable to the VCCTL is the work on the mixing and flow properties of HPC, in which staff seek to develop a model for predicting the rheological properties of HPC from key formulation details. A standard vocabulary for describing this work was laid out in a NIST Special Publication in January 2001.3 This project builds on past investigations of concrete

2  

The VCCTL is available online at <http://vcctl.cbt.nist.gov/>.

3  

V.A.Hackley and C.F.Ferraris, Guide to Rheological Nomenclature for Liquid-Based Particle Systems, NIST Special Publication 946, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md., January 2001.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

workability and the more subjective quality of finishability; workability in particular has been identified by means of a survey as an important factor in improving the processing of HPC. The panel is impressed by how the project is addressing real and practical needs but from a strong theoretical and experimental perspective.

The work on concrete and cement characterization focuses on microscopic and x-ray techniques, and the division is expanding its access to relevant experimental capabilities and developing important expertise. Recently an x-ray system designed to track through-thickness moisture content in materials was installed at NIST, and the division should find this instrument very valuable for studies on the drying and curing of concrete. The instrument at NIST is the first of its kind in the United States and only the second in the world. The original instrument is in Denmark, and a division researcher has already become familiar with its capabilities during a sabbatical stay at that laboratory, where he used the Danish equipment to produce useful results.

To provide data that complement the work that will be done with the new moisture-monitoring system, the Building Materials Division is installing an environmental chamber on the laboratory’s powder diffractometer. With this equipment, researchers continue to make strides in their use of microscopic techniques to identify materials and material interactions in cement and concrete. At the beginning of this work, idealized spherical and ellipsoidal particles were assumed when studying the ways in which particle size and structure influence concrete, but recently x-ray tomography has been utilized to obtain real particle shapes that can be used to refine existing models. In the project that will take advantage of this new data, the division’s HPC modeling and simulation effort will first develop models to predict the elastic moduli of concrete, with the eventual objective of also predicting viscoelastic properties. A company in the VCCTL consortium is providing moduli data from real systems to assist division staff in model development.

In the Organic Materials Group, the emphasis on service life prediction of polymeric building materials provides a strong organizing theme for the collection of individual but related projects. The group is taking a fundamental approach to understanding durability, and work is aimed at identifying the real metrics of performance degradation and its fundamental causes and effects. Below, the panel discusses the array of projects that are focused on this goal.

A major achievement of 2000 was the completion of 3 years of development, construction, and testing of the Building Materials Division’s integrating sphere, a large chamber that allows researchers to expose samples to spatially uniform ultraviolet light. The sphere is now being used to collect data for validation of the reciprocity law for polymers. The issues under investigation in this study have significant economic and competitive ramifications, and the study will have an impact, particularly if the data collection and analysis can be completed in a timely manner. The panel notes that the sphere provides controlled exposure of samples, but other techniques are required to analyze the changes in the samples. The group is preparing for this task and has added capabilities for the rapid acquisition of Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and attenuated total reflectance data, which would allow quick differentiation between surface and bulk chemical changes in exposed materials.

The panel believes that the work on the reciprocity law is an excellent first experiment for the sphere. This instrument is an important new tool in the service life prediction field, and the technology was recently recognized by R & D Magazine. Many of the Organic Materials Group’s key objectives involve the use of this instrument, and the panel believes that it will be a valuable tool. The only concern is the light leaks observed in the sphere during the panel’s visit; such leaks could interfere with its safe and efficient operation. However, staff have assured the panel that the leaks will soon be sealed.

The interlaboratory work on appearance quantification methodologies, including methods to measure optical reflectance and scattering and investigations of optical properties of coatings, continues. These

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

activities are carried out in conjunction with the Physics Laboratory, the Information Technology Laboratory, and the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory. Currently, staff are constructing a new laser goniometric scattering system, and this instrument, along with neutron scattering and other methods, will be used to probe microstructural changes in coatings as a function of exposure to UV radiation. One of the goals of this program is to create computer renderings of objects covered with light-interference pigmented coatings and other complex reflective substances; this capability has already been demonstrated for relatively simple reflective coatings. Plans also include expanding the materials of interest to include composites, which are now being used in the construction of more visible areas of buildings. While the work on optical properties of coatings is most closely related to the service life prediction goals, the optical reflectance and scattering activities utilize many of the same methodologies and are certainly of interest to NIST’s customers; a consortium of companies interested in NIST’s work on advanced reflectance and scattering measurements and modeling is expected to be established in 2001.

The Building Materials Division has sharpened its focus in the area of nanoscale chemical characterization, and staff are taking advantage of the laboratory’s AFM to probe structures and absorbed species on surfaces at a very fine level. One project is examining how the service life of polymeric materials and systems is compromised by scratches and mars. The necessary first task for this work is to develop the means for systematically and quantifiably characterizing scratches and mars, and the panel is pleased that staff recognize the importance of this task. This project is the first for the Polymer Interphases Consortium, and the division is receiving some direction from three corporate sponsors from this consortium. In a related project that is part of the established Coatings Service Life Prediction Consortium, the goal is to develop models that can be used to describe and quantify surface moisture in the field as well as the laboratory and to relate these models to service life prediction. To carry out research in this area, the division developed a new kind of humidity chamber for the AFM, and a patent has been filed on the technology. The work on this project has been very productive; in 2000 and early 2001, researchers in the laboratory presented, submitted, or had published over 15 papers in the areas of AFM and nanoindentation.

A very new effort in the Organic Materials Group is the project on sealant durability. A workshop was held at NIST in September 2000, and industry proved to be so enthusiastic about having the laboratory do work in this area that a consortium on sealant durability is nearly ready to be launched. The NIST effort is still in the planning stage, but the goal is to apply methodologies developed for other service-life-prediction projects to the study of sealants and to focus on the effects of mechanical stress during exposure to UV and other environmental influences. The project is coordinated with the Office of Applied Economics (OAE) work for HUD on Web-based systems to support decisions about durability in housing construction and materials. Staff in the OAE have developed a prototype for such a system, called the Durability Doctor, which is an interactive computer site that would help homebuilders and their clients understand the real costs of choosing one material over others in building or remodeling a home. This software tool will be useful only if there exist reliable and reproducible measures of durability for a wide variety of building materials. While the panel understands the appeal of this concept, it also believes that the value of individual division projects should not be determined by whether they can or could feed results into this effort. While a tool for making durability-related decisions would certainly be attractive to builders and homeowners, the development of a Durability Doctor would present significant challenges to the technical capabilities of the commercial materials community. The pressures associated with which materials would or should be included in such software could also test the integrity of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory and of NIST.

All of the above programs demonstrate how actively the Building Materials Division is participating in the development and adoption of next-generation building materials. However, NIST is aware of the

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

past and continues to make contributions in the area of certain older materials. For 50 years, the Building and Fire Research Laboratory has maintained the NIST Stone Test Wall, and a well-organized database listing information on and images of all the stone samples in the wall can now be found on the Internet.4 The division plans to study the microstructure of the various specimens and look for correlations between structure and observed durability in the field. While this work is valuable in part because stone is still used in buildings today, the division’s work on standards and extraction techniques for lead in paints is based on the fact that such paints are no longer used or even wanted in residences. Early in 2000, the division published laboratory evaluations of spot test kits for detection of lead in household paints, and staff recently completed their investigation into the effectiveness of anodic stripping voltametry, an established electrochemical technique, for quantifying lead levels in coatings. Results were published in early 2001.

The accomplishments and activities described above are impressive, but the panel did notice that there appeared to be fewer visible interactions on projects with other Building and Fire Research Laboratory units than in the past. Such relationships do still exist; for example, the involvement with the Fire Division’s project in fire-retardant materials was sufficient to produce two coauthored publications recently. However, given its strength in the highly interdisciplinary field of materials science, the Building Materials Division could contribute its skills and expertise to more joint projects with other groups both within the Building and Fire Research Laboratory and across NIST. While such collaborations preferably should directly support the division and laboratory missions, work that builds relationships that will bring valuable theoretical expertise or experimental capabilities to the division can also be of long-term benefit. Since many worthwhile cooperative research programs investigate fundamental interdisciplinary questions, it is likely that these activities may never receive substantial funding from external sources. Nonetheless, it would be prudent of laboratory management to allow the technical staff to establish independent seed projects from time to time, as such projects on basic issues can lay the groundwork and provide the experience for good and important applied programs.

Program Relevance and Effectiveness

The relevance of the Building Materials Division’s work is clear from the strong support the division receives from consortia of companies, universities, and trade associations. These consortia, most of which are managed by NIST staff, provide a mechanism for industrial and other external input into divisional projects as well as a channel for dissemination of NIST results and adoption of NIST-developed techniques and products. While division staff organize these consortia, in many cases the driving force for the formation of these consortia was an outside institution or group of companies impressed by the division’s capabilities and interested in becoming more closely involved in its activities.

In addition to their formal interactions with these consortia, division staff reach out to the relevant communities in a number of ways. They are responsible for presentations at a number of meetings and for publications in many peer-reviewed journals, and the division does partner with individual companies in certain areas. Overall, the interactions with industry and trade associations appear to be very robust, but the panel did sense that the relationships with academic researchers and institutions could be stronger and more numerous. The collaborations that do exist with universities appear to have been based, appropriately, on their relevance to division project objectives, and the joint work seems to be of

4  

Background and data on the NIST Stone Test Wall, which was constructed in 1948, are available online at <http://patapsco.nist.gov/bfrl/stonewall/>.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

great value. The panel does not suggest that academic relationships be pursued purely to expand the division’s list of collaborators but rather that more cooperative projects (like those that currently exist) would contribute to mission and project goals.

One example of a very relevant project under way in the Building Materials Division is the VCCTL, which aims to produce substantial savings for the $33 billion concrete industry. The goal is to simulate the results of a standard 28-day test of the mechanical strength and hardness of cured concrete, reducing the industry’s reliance on these tests during the concrete optimization procedure. Savings would accrue from a shorter time to market, less waste of materials, and fewer human and fiscal resources devoted to testing procedures. Simulations can also provide a low-cost approach to investigating the use of new materials in concrete. The microstructural analysis technique used at NIST is a valuable tool for demonstrating how changes in raw materials produce changes in structure and properties, and the results from this type of simulation could encourage industry to try using new materials in concrete, particularly waste materials (e.g., fly ash or slag) that might improve the quality and lower the cost of concrete materials.

In the past, the panel was concerned about how the high-quality work being done at NIST could be effectively disseminated to the hundreds of concrete and cement producers in the country. While this will still be a challenging task, the establishment of the VCCTL consortium is an excellent first step. This consortium brings together some very large corporate sponsors and a major trade association, all of which have agreed to participate actively in the testing of the VCCTL through extended visits by their technical staff to the Building and Fire Research Laboratory. These guest researchers will help assess how the VCCTL can be used to develop concrete and cement materials based on performance, and the division can use their experiences to improve the software and bring it closer to being a practical tool for the intended customer base.

The array of projects related to service-life prediction of building materials is immensely valuable to manufacturers and users of these materials because NIST is taking a unified approach to understanding and quantifying durability. At this time, industry’s approaches to evaluating service life are largely empirical and extremely time-consuming, and they result in lengthy product development cycles and high development costs. The NIST work in this area seeks to replace current practices (multiyear exposure in poorly characterized environments, an empirical approach to the problem) with experiments in well-characterized environments with superior reproducibility and repeatability and with a focus on discovering the underlying causes of material degradation. Laboratory staff have already identified the active factors affecting service life, are considering both chemical and microstructural effects, and are investigating both bulk and interfacial and interphasal phenomena. The portfolio of efforts currently under way represents a comprehensive body of work that has been well planned and methodically pursued in the division.

The relevance of the service-life prediction work to current industry concerns is confirmed by the participation of several large companies in division-organized consortia, such as the 7-year-old Coatings Service Life Prediction Consortium and the newly formed Polymer Interphases Consortium, and the interest of these and other companies in nascent division consortia on sealants and material appearance. The Building Materials Division makes extensive use of consortia in the course of its projects, and the panel continues to have some concerns about the fact that intellectual property agreements associated with consortia can delay the public release of information considered to be proprietary to consortia members. However, NIST researchers in these areas do attend—and, in some cases, sponsor—workshops, conferences, and other meetings at which the division’s major findings are presented to a wider audience, and they have also published many of their key results in refereed journals.

In a project related to the service life prediction program and utilizing the new integrating sphere,

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

the division is characterizing the properties of FRP composites. The ultimate goal of this work is to prepare for composites what already exists for steel, wood, and concrete: a design standard—specifically, a standard based on load and resistance factor design. Such a standard would provide an objective means to determine when these composites could be used in structures appropriately and would help define their benefits. The division’s efforts in this area are twofold. On the technical front, staff are providing the basis for understanding how composites perform under environmental stresses. NIST is uniquely positioned to carry out such experiments owing to the equipment and expertise available in the division. Results will be key to developing the necessary standards. The division is also working with composite manufacturers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Civil Engineering Research Foundation, and similar bodies to encourage the establishment of a load and resistance factor design standard and lay the groundwork for its adoption.

Division Resources

Funding sources for the Building Materials Division are shown in Table 7.3. As of January 2001, staffing for the Building Materials Division included 20 full-time permanent positions, of which 17 were for technical professionals. There were also 3 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.

A significant portion of the Building Materials Division’s budget is derived from external sources. This outside funding has both positive and negative aspects. One problem with outside support, especially from other government agencies, is that it is often unpredictable and must be renewed each year. For example, the final budget for fiscal year 2001 will probably not be close to the estimates provided in Table 7.3, as a number of grants and other funds (such as a potential $0.7 million from HUD) are expected to add substantially to the total. It can be difficult to make long-range program plans in this uncertain fiscal environment. In the case of outside funding from companies, usually transferred

TABLE 7.3 Sources of Funding for the Building Materials Division (in millions of dollars), FY 1998 to FY 2001

Source of Funding

Fiscal Year 1998 (actual)

Fiscal Year 1999 (actual)

Fiscal Year 2000 (actual)

Fiscal Year 2001 (estimated)

NIST-STRS, excluding Competence

1.7

1.8

1.8

1.9

Competence

0.2

0.2

0.2

0.2

STRS, nonbase

0.1

0.1

0.1

0.1

ATP

0.2

0.1

0.1

0.1

OA/NFG/CRADA

1.7

1.8

2.2

1.1

Other Reimbursable

0.0

0.1

0.1

0.0

Total

3.9

4.1

4.5

3.4

Full-time permanent staff (total)a

24

21

20

20

NOTE: Sources of funding are as described in the note accompanying Table 7.1.

aThe number of full-time permanent staff is as of January of that fiscal year.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

via cooperative research and development agreements (CRADAs) associated with consortia, the concern centers on the time and effort required for senior researchers to establish these agreements with outside institutions and to organize the consortia. For example, the Coatings Consortium took several years to put together, although it now serves as a good model for newer consortia efforts. The primary burden on staff time occurs when the structure and membership are organized and research plans are laid, and in 2000 four new consortia were either started or progressed substantially towards formation. These activities clearly require significant efforts by the technical staff, but the panel was assured that once a consortium is established, only minimal administration is required of senior personnel.

Some of the positive aspects of outside funding include the external validation of the relevance of NIST’s efforts and the valuable relationships formed with the funders, which act as channels for disseminating results to industry, where they find immediate and fruitful applications. In addition, the money from outside sources allows the division to engage in many more activities than if it relied solely on the limited support available from NIST core funding. The externally supported programs, provided that they remain consistent with the laboratory and division missions and objectives, can be appropriate and valuable. Overall, the panel believes that the division is currently using the outside money to support high-quality research, but the panel also cautions that when the dependence on external agencies and organizations is so high (49 percent in fiscal year 2000), there is always the danger that pressure from these other institutions could alter the division’s research agenda.

The Building Materials Division has a very strong staff, but the panel’s main concern is a lack of hands-on help for the senior researchers in the division. While this problem may have been particularly noticeable in a year when a significant amount of senior staff time and energy was devoted to the establishment of consortia, the panel believes the problem has been apparent for some time. Division personnel are spread thin, and each project area relies heavily on specific individuals for progress. While pursuit of funding and organization of consortia are important tasks, the division also has to ensure that projects move forward at a reasonable pace, and the panel believes that additional human resources are needed to do that. According to division management, the staff positions that most need filling are advanced analytical chemist, informatics specialist, junior physical scientist, senior materials scientist, and, potentially, senior scientist specializing in color and appearance.

Another human resources issue is the upcoming retirement of the division chief. Not only has he provided excellent leadership, but he has also been a key technical resource for some division programs, specifically, HYPERCON, and he will be greatly missed. The panel notes that good candidates for this position exist both inside and outside NIST and encourages laboratory management to carefully consider how all of the division programs will be affected by whatever changes are made. For example, since many of the projects have single-point coverage, if someone within the division were promoted, program emphases and resources would inevitably shift.

The equipment in the Building Materials Division is very good, and some programs have access to state-of-the-art instrumentation. The division recognizes that its needs change with technological advances and shifting programmatic focuses, so it is making an effort to acquire the tools technical staff need to efficiently meet current and future goals. For fiscal year 2001, capital equipment funding has been sought for a nanoindentation instrument for work on interfaces and interphases, a faster workstation with improved storage capacity for HPC modeling work, and additional support for the laser goniometric system being built for use on the appearance project. In fiscal year 2002, the division plans to seek money for a particle size analyzer for HPC work, an ellipsometer for the interfaces and interphases project, and an integrating sphere with special capabilities to allow the division to study ultraviolet exposure of building joint sealants. All of these tools appear to be worthwhile and relevant to the projects under way in the division, and the panel believes that the division has appropriately considered

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

its equipment needs when making its requests and has adequately demonstrated the necessity of the desired instrumentation. The division is clearly aware of the limitations on capital equipment purchases, as can be seen by the decision to continue using the Federal Highway Administration’s x-ray tomography system rather than acquiring one for NIST.

Building Environment Division

Technical Merit

According to division documentation, the mission of the Building Environment Division is to reduce the cost of designing and operating buildings and increase the international competitiveness of the U.S. building industry by providing modeling, measurement, and test methods needed to use advanced computation and automation effectively in construction, to improve the quality of the indoor environment, and to improve the performance of building equipment and systems.

The Building Environment Division has a diverse array of projects that support this mission, and the panel is very impressed with the projects and the enthusiasm of division personnel. The work has high technical merit, and staff are making good progress toward well-defined goals. The division has a number of good long-term activities—such as measurements of photovoltaic panels and work on how MEMS technologies can be applied to refrigeration systems—and some seed projects—such as the effort to define performance standards for fuel cells. It is important for NIST to maintain a balance between the two types of effort, as the seed projects lay the groundwork for major programs expected to have significant impact.

The division is responsible for the laboratory’s work on Enhancing Building Performance. This goal has three elements: healthy and sustainable buildings, cybernetic building systems, and optimized building life-cycle performance. The first element, healthy and sustainable buildings, is by far the largest, with 34 individual projects carried out by three groups (Thermal Machinery, Heat Transfer and Alternative Energy Systems, and Indoor Air Quality and Ventilation). The work on cybernetic building systems occurs in the Mechanical Systems and Controls Group, while the work on optimized building life-cycle performance, a new element of the division’s efforts, will be covered by the Computer-Integrated Construction Group. Below, the panel describes some of the recent activities and accomplishments of the Building Environment Division.

The Thermal Machinery Group contains a wide array of activities centering on technologies and chemicals that could help reduce energy consumption in building air conditioning systems. The activities range from basic research efforts to the construction of prototype systems. An example of the former type of activity is the new work investigating single-phase heat transfer in a 100-μ-wide channel. This work seeks to understand the apparent disparity between micro- and macrochannel heat-transfer data and the physics governing the two situations. A possible explanation for the observed difference is maldistribution of flow between channels, so NIST staff are making the local measurements in a single channel. Sixty platinum heaters placed end to end on the bottom of the channel are used to locally measure the heat flux and the wall temperature, and the resulting data should help resolve the issue. A primary motive for this study is to support an ongoing Advanced Technology Program effort on a key chain-size chip for DNA analysis, but the understanding gained will also benefit future studies of microchannel heat exchangers and of MEMS applications in vapor compression systems.

In other MEMS-related work, the group is studying how MEMS technologies can be used in the control and maintenance of refrigeration and air conditioning machinery. In 2000, staff constructed a prototype MEMS device that can serve as a vibration sensor for a refrigerant compressor. This proto-

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

type was used to evaluate the performance of a compressor, and the quality and usefulness of the measurements were encouraging. A second generation of the vibration sensor will be manufactured in 2001 by an outside contractor. The panel commends the Building Environment Division for using the small business innovation research (SBIR) grant mechanism to involve a company in this work, thereby accelerating the program. Having demonstrated the value of MEMS technologies for evaluating one element of refrigeration and air conditioning systems, the group can now turn to other potential applications, such as monitoring systems to check if they are operating within expected design specifications.

The Thermal Machinery Group has a variety of other activities under way. The project on refrigerants with low global warming potential is characterizing the thermodynamic and heat-transfer performance of compounds such as carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrocarbons, and flammable fluorocarbons. The primary focus is on CO2, and plans for 2001 include analyzing the data collected last year on CO2 evaporation heat transfer, taking new measurements to study the impact of a lubricant on CO2 heat transfer performance and using NIST’s semitheoretical models to evaluate the relative merits of CO2 and R-410A (a high-pressure fluid being considered as a refrigerant). In the project on improving the fundamental understanding of the phase-change process of refrigerant-lubricant mixtures, work is progressing well. A fluorescence-spectroscopy measurement technique is being used to determine the concentration of lubricant at the internal-tube boiling surface. The test apparatus is orderly and well-designed, but the panel believes that using a more fluorescent lubricant would improve the accuracy of the technique. Finally, the group continues to work on improving the performance of vapor-compression systems using both computer- and hardware-based methods. Approaches include simulation models, MEMS, artificial intelligence methods, and laboratory tests needed for validation of computer models.

The Heat Transfer and Alternative Energy Systems Group has traditionally concentrated its activities on techniques for photovoltaic and thermal conductivity measurements, but this year the focus has expanded to include moisture measurements and fuel cell standards. In the last area, performance standards are critically needed to encourage the widespread adaptation of fuel cell systems, and the group’s new initiative is welcome. In the photovoltaic testing project, data collection began in January 2000 on the photovoltaic panels recently installed in the wall of a NIST building. Interest in this sort of installation is based on the hope that integrating panels into the building envelope will reduce the overall cost of a photovoltaic system. The results of the NIST study will be published in the near future in the technical literature. Short-term characterization of various cell technologies will start soon; the goal here is to build a collection of performance data to be compared with a predictive performance model developed at NIST. In the thermal conductivity area, the data from many years of NIST measurements on building insulation materials have been integrated into a database that is publicly available on the Web.5 A new, larger test facility is being built that will allow staff to perform thermal conductivity measurement at elevated temperatures. At the moment, such measurements cannot be made accurately in the United States.

The Indoor Air Quality and Ventilation Group is working on contaminant-based design procedures, Web-based airflow design and analysis, and large-building infiltration and ventilation. Progress continues to be made across the group. Activities include the ongoing monitoring of a building with educational and office space at Oberlin College in Ohio. The goal is validation of NIST’s multizone airflow and contaminant transport analysis computer program (known as CONTAM) and analysis of how well

5  

The NIST Heat Transmission Properties of Insulating and Building Materials database is available online at <http://srdata.nist.gov/insulation/>.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

the building’s ventilation system is working. For users of CONTAM outside NIST, staff have released a Windows version of this simulation package. Building on this work, the group is developing a Web site that will contain a variety of airflow design and analysis tools, such as CONTAM, weather file creation programs, and related tools.6

In the Mechanical Systems and Controls Group, the main efforts are on the Building Automation and Control network (BACnet), fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) for HVAC systems, and the virtual cybernetic building testbed (VCBT). In BACnet, the full-scale demonstration in the Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco continues to progress well, and other demonstration projects are being planned for the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and Army National Guard facilities in Iowa. Current technical work emphasizes the expansion of BACnet capabilities beyond HVAC applications into lighting and security systems. In FDD, several key activities were completed. In the field test of fault detection tools at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland, several problems with the test building were identified and corrected, but NIST personnel learned that successful commercialization of this technology will require an easy-to-use interface that can be understood by maintenance staff. Current efforts include participation in a new IEA Annex on commissioning of building HVAC systems for improved energy performance. The group plans to build on past work with FDD and BACnet testing tools and use simulations to investigate whether automated tools for commissioning HVAC control systems can be developed.

The panel is impressed by the progress being made on the development of the VCBT, which is designed to link simulation models with real BACnet controllers. Recent accomplishments include expanding the VCBT to include nine zones and developing fault models for FDD testing and smoke tracking. Future plans include focusing the modeling research on better understanding of fire-HVAC interactions, improving simulations by addressing mass and energy balance problems, adding radiation effects, and combining the various tools to more effectively represent building system interactions. NIST staff are conducting workshops to introduce the concept of cybernetic building systems and the VCBT to industry, and this year two new industry partners (Simplex and Automated Logic) have donated equipment.

In the Computer-Integrated Construction Group, past work focused on technologies to allow seamless sharing of information about a building throughout its life. The projects are closely related to the work under way in the Construction Metrology and Automation Group of the Structures Division. While there is considerable, although not entirely seamless, coordination between the efforts of the two groups, the panel continues to be concerned that the artificial separation into two different divisions of staff and resources dedicated to meeting the same or closely related goals is impeding progress. The technical research of these groups is interdisciplinary in nature, and the administrative structure should support, not discourage, the horizontal, dynamic collaborative relations needed to move forward in this area.

In the Computer-Integrated Construction Group, the emphasis is shifting to a new goal, described as optimized building life-cycle performance. This program has two components: (1) integration of information relating to building form, function, and behavior from design through commissioning, operation, and maintenance and (2) development of the economic support structure required for the lifecycle analysis. The idea of considering how a building will perform over its entire lifetime is an appropriate and interesting one, but the role of this group and of NIST in this area does not seem to be well defined. Industry is not thinking along these lines at this time, and it is not clear who would support the division’s efforts or implement any of their results in the field.

6  

The relevant software is available online at <http://www.bfrl.nist.gov/863/contam/>.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

The panel is concerned about the pressure on the Computer-Integrated Construction Group to work on a variety of different projects and support multiple goals. Staff are already spread thin, and funding does not appear to be available to hire more people. For the new goal in optimized building life-cycle performance, the group will need significant division support and further resources to define a path, including which seed projects are appropriate, where longer range funding will come from, and how to identify new personnel to support the work.

Given the wide array of projects described above, the shifting priorities of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, and the changing needs of the Building Environment Division’s customers, a key element of maintaining the effectiveness of division projects is continuous reallocation of resources. The panel is impressed by the division’s efforts to tighten its focus and explore new opportunities. Recently completed projects include the CRADAs with Johnson Controls and Honeywell on demonstration of fault detection tools and the development of FDD methods at Montgomery College. Division resources for the support of the BACnet testing consortium were freed up when the consortium was replaced by the industry-supported BACnet Manufacturers’ Association.

Program Relevance and Effectiveness

The Building Environment Division has good connections with industrial groups and with other NIST customers. The staff maintain strong ties to users of the technologies being studied in the division as well as to their peers in related research communities. Activities that help the division build these important relations and partnerships include publishing journal articles and NIST technical reports, developing and distributing software tools, and serving on committees like those run by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

One reason this division is so valuable is its ability to move entire fields forward by developing and disseminating new standards and tools that industry can use to improve the quality of building design, construction, and operation. Several division products and efforts continue to have a significant impact. The BACnet communication protocol standard has been embraced by industry; in 1998, there were 4000 installations worldwide of BACnet products, and this year there have been almost 20,000. Industry has even formed a BACnet Manufacturers’ Association to activity promote the effectiveness of BACnet and the use of its products. The CONTAM software package developed by NIST is being disseminated via the Internet, and its validation using data gathered from a real building will help the division demonstrate CONTAM’s value to the building community. The division has a history of devising successful computer simulations of refrigerant performance, and tools like CYCLE D for system cycle calculations and REFLEAK for predicting refrigerant mixture leakage behavior are widely used by the refrigeration and air conditioning industry today. Finally, the division’s efforts in measuring the thermal conductivity of insulating materials have been popular and unique. On average, over 2500 pages are downloaded from the new Web database of past NIST measurements in this area each month. The ongoing construction of a new facility for accurate conductivity measurements at high temperatures will provide capabilities that are currently lacking in this country.

In the past, the panel recommended that the Building Environment Division increase the involvement of industry in its work on phase changes in refrigerant-lubricant mixtures, as the ultimate goal is to enable companies to design and manufacture more efficient, lower-cost air-conditioning systems. This year, the panel was pleased to see that the division has successfully recruited five companies to participate in a proposed Department of Energy project that will expand the effort under way at NIST. These companies—FLUENT, Inc., Trane Co., Wolverine, Inc., ICI Americas, and McQuay, Inc.—have committed to providing in-kind support to the project, including joint testing and work on lubricant development.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

TABLE 7.4 Sources of Funding for the Building Environment Division (in millions of dollars), FY 1998 to FY 2001

Source of Funding

Fiscal Year 1998 (actual)

Fiscal Year 1999 (actual)

Fiscal Year 2000 (actual)

Fiscal Year 2001 (estimated)

NIST-STRS, excluding Competence

4.4

3.7

4.1

4.6

STRS, nonbase

1.0

0.7

0.8

0.8

ATP

0.0

0.1

0.2

0.2

OA/NFG/CRADA

1.9

2.0

1.6

2.8

Total

7.3

6.5

6.7

8.4

Full-time permanent staff (total)a

37

36

35

35

NOTE: Sources of funding are as described in the note accompanying Table 7.1.

aThe number of full-time permanent staff is as of January of that fiscal year.

Division Resources

Funding sources for the Building Environment Division are shown in Table 7.4. As of January 2001, staffing for the Building Environment Division included 35 full-time permanent positions, of which 33 were for technical professionals. There were also 5 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.

Most of the groups have adequate personnel to meet the program goals. One exception is the Mechanical Systems and Controls Group, where too few personnel may be impeding the group’s ability to meet near-term goals on its projects and where three or four additional people are needed. The Computer-Integrated Construction Group will also need to hire new people to pursue the new initiative in optimized building life-cycle performance. In both groups, the issue is not whether there are slots for new staff but the difficulties of recruiting the right people. The salaries NIST can offer are not competitive with those offered by industry, and complicated and restrictive Department of Commerce rules about hiring non-U.S. citizens make it too much trouble for NIST to pursue potential employees of this type. Throughout the division, even where there are sufficient professional staff, there is a dearth of supporting technicians. In some cases, senior experimental investigators are spending considerable time on the detailed construction and maintenance of apparatus and instrumentation, and these tasks interfere with their productivity.

As was discussed in several past assessments, the condition of the large environmental chamber (Chamber 15) continues to be an issue. This facility and its control systems (refrigeration unit, heat transfer loop, and air handler) were constructed in 1965 and their useful lifetime is probably over. The primary concern is safety. The heat transfer loop contains methylene chloride, listed by the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists as a suspected human carcinogen, and the division must be very cautious when using this facility to keep staff exposure at or below recommended levels. Another serious problem is corrosion. The corrosion in the refrigeration system piping is making several valves inoperable, and the corrosion in the air handler is preventing its use for humidity control. Whether this chamber should be repaired needs to be decided soon.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

Division staff have outlined several reasons why maintaining this unique facility is important. It is currently the only NIST chamber capable of operating at low temperatures and of performing tests that involve flammable refrigerants. Its size (24×48×14 ft) is also unusual; it is sometimes called the “truck chamber” because an entire truck can be driven into it. In addition to its relevance for applications in the Building Environment Division, it also has capabilities that other NIST groups (the Fire Research Division and the Highway Technology Evaluation Center) have either used or expressed interest in using. While clearly the chamber will be used if it is repaired, the panel cautions that the division must assess whether the need for the facility’s capabilities is compelling when it decides if resources should be spent to overhaul or replace the chamber and its control systems.

At the other end of the facilities spectrum is the work on a new facility for testing the thermal conductivity of insulation materials at high temperatures (900 K). This facility will be an important addition to U.S. capabilities in this area, but currently the division does not have enough funding to complete construction, which is two-thirds done. Completion of this facility should have the highest priority, so additional support needs to be found.

Fire Research Division

Technical Merit

According to division documentation, the mission of the Fire Research Division is to develop, verify, and utilize measurements and predictive methods to quantify the behavior of fire and the means to reduce the impact of fire on people, property, and the environment.

The Fire Research Division is the result of a Building and Fire Research Laboratory reorganization in which two divisions (Fire Safety Engineering and Fire Science) were merged. The panel believes the reorganization was necessary and appropriate, is pleased to report that communication and cooperation among division personnel have improved, and expects the new structure to allow the laboratory to meet its overall goals more effectively and efficiently. The reorganization process is moving along but is not complete. Remaining issues include the need for more clearly defined goals for the division, for a more concrete link between the division mission and the activities of the various groups within it, for further alignment between funding sources and relevant programs, and for increasing intra- and interdivisional activities, including both formal collaborations and informal relationships.

The divisions that merged to form the new Fire Research Division have a history of doing world-class research in the measurement, modeling, and prediction of fire behavior. Therefore, it is natural that this division is responsible for the Building and Fire Research Laboratory’s effort on Fire Loss Reduction, which is supported through work in three areas—Advanced Fire Service Technologies (AFST), Advanced Measurement & Prediction Methods (AM&PM), and Reduced Risk of Flashover (RRF)—and whose ultimate purpose is to enable the engineering of fire safety for people, products, facilities, and first responders. The overall laboratory focus on Fire Loss Reduction was new in 2000, and the three supporting areas were defined during the reorganization. Perhaps because the division and its recently defined programmatic focuses are relatively young, the panel felt that the objectives presented in the spring of 2001 were still a work in progress (see below for the objectives of the three supporting areas). The objectives need to be rewritten to be clearer and more concise, and the achievements expected of division staff should be better quantified. In addition to reworking the current objectives, the Fire Research Division should consider adding an objective: supporting the life safety goals defined by the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA).

The panel believes that improvements in the laboratory’s focus in the fire area have occurred over

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

the past year, and, as a whole, division efforts seem more structured and streamlined. Small projects whose purpose, in the past, was unclear to the panel have now been incorporated into major programs, so the larger objectives of NIST work in those areas are beginning to be defined. However, the panel believes there is still much progress to be made. To mold the division’s work into a coherent whole, the division mission statement, the overall objectives, and the focus of individual projects need to be closely aligned and should mutually support and reinforce one another.

In its site visits to the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, the panel found that the Fire Research Division has excellent people performing high-quality work. A brief list of the useful and impressive projects under way would include research on protective clothing, contributions to advances in aids for fire-fighting training, assisting in investigations of incidents where firefighters died, the program on fire reconstruction modeling, work on smart zone fire alarm systems, improved involvement with codes and standards efforts, the study of nanocomposites, and the development of fire simulations. The quality of the division’s programs is a direct result of the excellence of the people on the staff. This past year, two individuals were recognized for their contributions. One member of the Fire Research Division was elected to the National Academy of Engineering “for developing and implementing broadly applicable analytical models and numerical tools for understanding and mitigating fire phenomena.” Another staff member was awarded the Department of Commerce Gold Medal “for leading the transformation of materials flammability from a field dominated by prediction uncertainties so large that they were of little value to manufacturers and regulators, to a field based on scientific understanding and sound engineering.”

Below the panel discusses the three main areas of research in the division by describing the laboratory’s official goals in each area and some of the projects under way.

According to the division, the objective of the AFST program is to enhance, through research, firefighter safety and effectiveness that will help to achieve a 50 percent reduction in line-of-duty fatalities and burn injuries in the United States by 2012. The strategy employed by NIST is to make advances in measurement and prediction that would help provide more reliable, accurate, and timely information for fire-fighting incident command, fire investigation, and training, which in turn is expected to result in a safer fire-fighting environment.

The AFST program produces advanced concepts and tools that can, in many cases, reduce direct and indirect fire-related costs, reduce fatalities among firefighters, improve international competitiveness, and facilitate regulatory improvements and reform. Examples of projects delivering these sorts of results include the research on ways to measure the performance of protective clothing for firefighters, using models developed at NIST to reconstruct fire events; development of a prototype fire alarm panel that uses informational displays to assist firefighters responding to events in large buildings; research on what information command officers need at the scene of an emergency; and the production of a fire service research bulletin, which is designed to keep the fire service up to date on national and international research. These projects are very useful, but the panel notes that the division’s efforts in this area might productively be supplemented by work in behavioral science. Much of what occurs at the frontlines of the fire service may be attributable to the behavior of people in an emergency, but NIST is not conducting any research in this area.

According to the division, the objective of the AM&PM program is to continue to be the principal supplier to the world of the basic measurement and prediction methods that underpin the goal of reducing fire losses. The strategy for accomplishing this objective includes providing the science to enable other laboratory programs; maintaining specialized facilities at critical scales; compiling, evaluating, archiving, and distributing fire data and information; and, finally, acting as a technical source and neutral facilitator on key codes and standards issues.

In the AM&PM area, staff use a number of different approaches to modeling direct numerical

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

simulation to evaluate selected properties of flame behavior and extinction. Large-eddy simulations are used in the fire dynamics simulator (FDS). A number of zone models are used in other projects. Because the levels of detail and validity in each of these modeling approaches are different, the various models may be used synergistically in fire research. An example of the sort of modeling being done in the AM&PM area at this time is the work to develop an accurate model of heat and mass transport that can be used to simulate fire phenomena—for example, the ignition and burning of real materials such as furnishings or structures. Because heat transfer drives fire spread and growth, an analytical framework for an improved convective heat transfer algorithm has been developed and will be deployed as Version 2 of the FDS.

In addition to the modeling efforts, Fire Research Division staff are also engaged in developing and using advanced measurement methods. Nearly all of the techniques currently used for fire characterization in industry have been in practice for several decades and generally do not incorporate the great strides that have made in instrumentation and data acquisition abilities. NIST is actively seeking to develop new, more accurate approaches that fully utilize up-to-date technologies. Areas of interest include heat-release rates, heat flux, spray effects and behavior, and the flows induced by fires. The measurements are valuable in part because they are being employed to validate the zone and field models for predicting fire behavior. The strength of the division’s efforts in measurement technologies is due to the core competencies maintained in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory over the years and capabilities provided by legacy and externally funded programs. Diagnostics already investigated by the division include thermocouples, a new type of smoke meter, and the furniture calorimeter to measure heat-release rates. These earlier studies are winding down to logical points for conclusion, and a new effort on heat flux measurement is ramping up. This work will be coordinated with that of several international fire laboratories working under the auspices of the Forum for International Cooperation in Fire Research.

According to the division, the objective of the RRF program is to accelerate the development and implementation of technologies that will reduce by 50 percent the cost to eliminate flashover in residential buildings by 2011. The strategy for accomplishing this goal is to develop measurements and predictive methods that will help researchers better understand conditions leading to flashover, enable fire and environment sensing, apply advanced fire suppression technologies, and utilize new and improved materials whose fire resistance does not negatively impact performance or the environment and does not increase costs.

Reducing the likelihood that a fire will develop to the point of flashover is a new theme for the Fire Research Division; the program includes a wide range of activities, such as the investigation of ignition resistance and slow fire growth in fire-safe materials and the study of ways to predict fire growth, fire suppression, and fire detection. Since many of the projects contributing to the RRF program are new projects or established projects beginning new phases of work, they vary widely in focus and sophistication, although, overall, the panel found that the work had high technical merit.

One key element of the RRF program is the significant effort to improve the predictability of fire growth, and there is substantial overlap between this work and the activities under way in the AM&PM program. Relevant projects in the RRF area include the investigation of solid-phase fuel decomposition as well as of the gas-phase processes responsible for heating the fuel, and these projects are complemented by the work on predicting heat transfer in preflashover being pursued in connection with the development of Version 2 of the FDS, as described above. Other RRF projects include the implementation and testing of improved combustion and radiation models and work on the solid-phase portion of the problem that comprises efforts to better predict material burning rates and to produce materials that use novel fire retardants to enhance their fire properties. Finally, doorway flows are being studied

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

experimentally, and this fundamental work is valuable for its validation of new and existing fire growth models. However, the panel is divided on whether the project can produce any notable improvements in fire safety.

Over the past 20 years, smoke detection became an integral part of residential construction and has been responsible for a marked reduction in fire deaths. However, a new look at the performance of smoke detectors and the evolution of hazardous conditions in buildings is needed, and the division is tackling this problem with funding from HUD, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Underwriters Laboratory, USFA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The NIST project aims to provide modern data on smoke detector performance to gather the important fire signature data needed to further refine smoke detectors. The panel was pleased to see that this work is being conducted in close coordination with the laboratory office’s project on the sublethal effects of smoke on people, as the natural and effective linkage between these projects will enhance both of them.

Overall, the new Fire Research Division is moving forward, but the reorganization is not complete. As the new portfolio of programs is established, it will be important to build strong intradivisional relationships and projects and to find the synergies within the new division. It is also essential to cultivate interactions with the other divisions in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory. Since the Fire Research Division is located in a separate building, ways of promoting informal interactions should be found. An example of a potential interdivisional collaboration would be a project on fire-testing under load, which would combine work from the Structures Division and the Fire Research Division.

Another key element of the Fire Research Division’s programs should be fundamental research. Special attention should be paid to ensuring that enough such research is performed to lay the groundwork for future improvements in models and diagnostics; fundamental research could include work on fluid algorithms and physical submodels for fire simulations. There is often pressure to make every project fit neatly into explicit areas in support of goals with immediate applications, but occasionally taking the risk of working on some unconventional ideas is an important part of a complete research effort. Staff and divisional management should be encouraged to consider what sort of projects might fall into this category, and they should set up a process by which scientists can use some fraction of their time to initiate new work on small creative activities.

Program Relevance and Effectiveness

NIST’s work on fire-related issues has been internationally recognized for its many important scientific contributions over the years. Staff have a great deal of expertise and experience in this area that allow them to focus on fire safety through their mandate to develop basic fire measurements and predictive tools that can be used by both the building industry and fire-fighting personnel. The annual cost of fire, including losses due to fire, the application of building and fire codes, the cost of suppressing fires, and the cost of insurance, exceeds $128 billion per year in the United States. Therefore, Fire Research Division projects aimed at reducing fire losses clearly have the potential to impact the U.S. economy and many of its industries. To achieve this potential, division staff are reaching out to the various users of NIST results through a variety of mechanisms, including publications, presentations, the distribution of software products, and participation in codes and standards activities.

Overall, the division’s activities with code agencies will continue to have a positive impact. An important element of this work is maintaining involvement with international groups such as ISO, and this involvement should be strengthened to support the development of commonality among the standards of different countries. International efforts will also ensure that the new standards that emerge do not act as de facto trade barriers detrimental to U.S. commerce. Types of codes and standards efforts

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

under way in the division are particularly apparent in the AM&PM program, where staff are actively facilitating their development and adoption. With the ASTM, the division is working on fire standards and protective clothing. With the National Fire Protection Association, the focus is on development of specifications for residential sprinkler systems; the chair of the relevant committee is a NIST staff member. With the Construction Industry Board and the International Code Council, activities are related to performance-based building codes and standards affecting rail transport.

The panel believes that the importance of the Fire Research Division’s work in codes and standards lies in its potential to provide scientific knowledge and tools relevant to the codes and standards development process. Today, new codes are often based on the experiences of a group of professionals who have been assembled to write and promulgate the standards in a particular area. This process, especially as used to produce NFPA standards, does not guarantee that the ultimate code or standard will have a firm scientific basis. In order to have an impact in this area, the division needs not only to provide scientific research that is relevant for industry standards at the national, state, or local levels, but also to develop a strategy to insert the use of scientific knowledge and tools from that research into codes and standards development processes. To do so will require additional funding and personnel for research and dissemination. The panel acknowledges that the culture and political clout of the industries that are affected by and active in codes and standards activities will be an obstacle to the adoption of modern, scientific approaches, but the laboratory should use its experience to select the areas where NIST efforts are most likely to be able to stimulate changes. Staff should take advantage of NIST’s reputation for providing unbiased technical advice when they reach out to potential allies and advocates in industry to begin to promote changes in attitudes toward and development of standards and codes.

Another area in which the technical results and experience of the Fire Research Division can play a critical role is support of the fire service industry. This community is migrating from an intuitive approach based on experiential learning toward an approach based on scientific data and prediction tools. However, the efforts of NIST go widely unnoticed in this community. In a good first step, staff from the AFST program conducted several workshops to determine what issues the fire service considers important and how NIST can help in the transition to more scientific approaches. However, additional outreach is still needed, and dissemination efforts should be expanded and should include presentations at major fire conferences throughout the United States. The numerous journal articles and book chapters, NIST reports, and papers and presentations at conferences that were produced by the AFST program in the past year have built a strong awareness of NIST capabilities in the industrial and scientific communities, so outreach specifically to fire service groups will be the next big step.

In addition to providing technical expertise and guidance, the division is a prime source of high-quality scientific results of value to various industries. For example, in the AM&PM program, measurements and quantification of material flammability are contributing to the development of polymer nanocomposites that could be used to make new fire-retarding materials. The goal is to develop tools that will reduce the development time for new synthetic polymers, thereby lowering costs. Current efforts focus on modifying the combinatorial chemistry techniques used in the pharmaceutical sector so they can be used to investigate the parallel synthesis of multicomponent polymer nanocomposites. In other projects, the fire growth prediction capabilities of the FDS will benefit product developers and fire protection engineers by helping them understand what factors contribute to fire spread.

In the RRF area, there is every reason to believe, based on the resources available and the capabilities of the laboratory, that significant improvements in fire safety will be enabled by the work under way. Efforts to increase the understanding of how materials burn and to improve the fire properties of

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

materials will have long-range implications and payoffs. More awareness of how materials behave when incorporated into final products will enhance the product development cycle and will spur innovation. In projects directed toward shorter-term goals, the work on smoke detection is certainly relevant to NIST customers and the nation at large, and the division’s efforts could improve the use of existing technologies and spur the development of next-generation smoke-detecting techniques. The investigation of sublethal effects of smoke is a significant project whose results could affect material developers as well as fire safety designers. Finally, all of these large projects are supplemented by smaller efforts on pragmatic approaches to enhancing residential fire safety. While individually these efforts are modest, collectively they could substantially reduce the loss of life.

Division Resources

Funding sources for the Fire Research Division are shown in Table 7.5. As of January 2001, staffing for the Fire Research Division included 52 full-time permanent positions, of which 44 were for technical professionals. There were also 10 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.

The consolidation of the Fire Safety Engineering and Fire Science Divisions has significantly improved the morale of the staff in the new division. The reorganization is not yet complete and the gains in morale have been uneven, but the overall difference from last year is quite noticeable. One factor is a sense that the funding situation has recovered; no RIFs were scheduled, and the division’s resources were bolstered with a fiscal year 2001 congressional add-on of approximately $1.2 million

TABLE 7.5 Sources of Funding for the Fire Research Division (in millions of dollars), FY 1998 to FY 2001

Source of Funding

Fiscal Year 1998a (actual)

Fiscal Year 1999a (actual)

Fiscal Year 2000a (actual)

Fiscal Year 2001b (estimated)

NIST-STRS, excluding Competence

4.2

5.2

4.7

4.9

Competence

0.2

0.2

0.0

0.0

STRS, nonbase

0.6

0.6

0.5

0.7

ATP

0.1

0.1

0.2

0.2

OA/NFG/CRADA

3.7

3.6

3.9

5.2

Other Reimbursable

0.1

0.0

0.1

0.0

Total

8.9

9.7

9.4

11.0

Full-time permanent staff (total)c

56

56

57

52

NOTE: Sources of funding are as described in the note accompanying Table 7.1.

aThe funding and staff totals for fiscal years 1998 to fiscal year 2000 are the sums of the numbers from the Fire Safety Engineering Division and the Fire Science Division, which were combined at the end of fiscal year 2000 to form the new Fire Research Division.

bThese numbers do not reflect a fiscal year 2001 congressional add-on of roughly $1.2 million for fire-related activities at NIST.

cThe number of full-time permanent staff is as of January of that fiscal year.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

specifically designated for fire-related activities at NIST. The number of full-time permanent staff declined over the past year, but if stable resources are available to support new personnel, the panel supports the division’s efforts to recruit new staff and add expertise. As work on the reorganization continues, a key step will be building a uniform culture among the division’s groups.

The dependence on external funding continues to be relatively high in the new division. Including the congressional add-on, which is considered internal funding, 43 percent of the Fire Research Division’s estimated fiscal year 2001 funding comes from external sources; this percentage is the highest among the Building and Fire Research Laboratory divisions in fiscal year 2001. In each program area of the Fire Research Division, the forces driving the level of outside support are different. In the AM&PM program, the majority of funding comes from NIST core resources, as is appropriate given the long-term focus of many of the projects in this area. Nonetheless, the more fundamental work continues to be supplemented by significant efforts dedicated to small contracts from other agencies. These outside projects represent an opportunity to sustain skills and capabilities and keep the staff familiar with the needs of government agencies working in these areas. While they might dilute efforts directed at fulfilling the mission of the division, some projects of this type are certainly needed, and the fact that the laboratory is awarded these grants does testify to the technical merit of the NIST programs. The RRF program has the highest level of external support, and the panel believes that this should be viewed as a testament to the interest of the other government agencies that are NIST’s customers in this area. In the AFST program, the panel notes that current funding appears to be insufficient to meet the objectives laid out for this program. Given that the emphasis of this program is on meeting short-term customer needs, the panel worries that the insufficiency of funding for these projects may signal that the connections to the relevant communities are not as strong as they could be.

The key facility-related activity in the Fire Research Division is the modification and repair of the Large Fire Facility. This facility is being equipped with an improved emission control system to provide fire measurement capabilities in a safe and efficient manner. The panel is somewhat concerned that the performance of the new exhaust system, while understood in a steady-state case, has not been adequately analyzed in the transient modes in which it will be used in the facility. The panel will be pleased to see this facility operational again, as it will provide large fire measurement capabilities that are required to meet the needs of NIST customers from industry and government. The division also maintains other experimental systems, such as the transient application, recirculating pool fire suppression facility, which is used to evaluate fire suppression systems and materials.

Office of Applied Economics and Standards and Codes Services

The Office of Applied Economics (OAE) is located in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory Office. Until the middle of last year, the laboratory’s efforts in Standards and Codes Services were also directed out of the laboratory office by a key principal investigator. When that individual left, the standards and codes activities under way were divided up among various division and OAE staff members. This section reviews the OAE and comments on some of the laboratory’s standards- and codes-related activities.

Technical Merit

According to laboratory documentation, the mission of OAE is to provide economic products and services through research and consulting to industry and government agencies in support of productivity enhancement, economic growth, and international competitiveness, with a focus on improving the lifecycle quality and economy of constructed facilities.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

The work in OAE has the ultimate goal of facilitating cost-effective decision making. The products of the office incorporate technical results from the other units in the laboratory and generally are tools to help the construction industry understand when adopting new technologies and materials is a safe and efficient option. The programs under way are comprehensive, and the technical merit of the work is first rate. Products incorporate the latest available economic concepts, statistical tools, and behavioral analyses, and the staff provide excellent analytic decision-making tools packaged in user-friendly software.

In the standards and codes area, the goals are evolving. In the past, the focus was specifically on performance-based standards, but the overall objective was and is to work for the implementation of codes and standards that increase opportunities for innovation and enhance competitiveness. Most recently, the laboratory worked closely with HUD on two HUD initiatives: the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH) and the Healthy Homes Initiative (HHI). As the laboratory moves forward with current projects related to these past efforts, the biggest challenge will be mapping out a clear, long-term strategy for its involvement in codes and standards activities. If the technical results from the various divisions on new measurement technologies and advanced materials are to have the maximum impact on the construction industry, the laboratory must understand how the results could be used to develop codes and standards and must define the mechanisms for achieving NIST’s goal of changing the structure of codes and regulations to accommodate evolving technologies.

In the OAE and the standards and codes area, there are a number of projects recently completed, under way, or planned. The Benefits from Best Practices Applied to Construction Safety project looked at various construction practices and their impact on worker safety, specifically demonstrating how using more expensive practices could produce savings by reducing the costs associated with accidents. The long-term Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES) project continues and is expanding its reach into the relevant building communities. Below the panel discusses a few other highlights.

Several years ago, laboratory staff developed Alternative Life-Safety Analysis for Retrofit-cost Minimization (ALARM), which is a true performance standard designed for use in health care facilities. The heart of the effort is a software tool to help facility managers and design professionals achieve cost-effective compliance with the codes and safety standards that regulate special-use occupancies. The software allows the user to determine if an existing facility is in compliance and, if it is not, quickly finds the least expensive compliance strategy and estimates construction cost. Since this tool has been so successful for health care facilities applications, this project has been rejuvenated and expanded. Laboratory staff are partnering with the National Institute of Justice and the NIST Office of Law Enforcement Standards to adapt the system so it can analyze the plans of correctional facilities with respect to the special codes and standards that regulate such buildings. The new package for the corrections community will soon be rolled out, and staff are already making contact with prospective partners in other communities that have buildings with specialized regulatory requirements.

A new initiative in OAE is developing paradigms to systematically assess the likelihood of a given emerging technology being adopted by a specific industry. This effort, under way for the NIST ATP, focuses on the technologies and industries that have been supported by this program. If OAE is successful in this endeavor, it will lay the groundwork for the related (but opposite) question: Given the needs of business and industry, what types of technological innovations should be targeted, that is, which potential new capabilities offer the greatest probability of becoming commercial successes? The ability to answer this question systematically would be a key element of cost-effectively identifying and assigning priority to research and development efforts in a variety of fields.

In addition to learning about ongoing work, the panel was told about a newly proposed activity for the standards and codes area. The idea is for BFRL to partner with a major research center to develop

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

a system of quality metrics for housing. Such a system would aim to enable home buyers to evaluate and compare the performance of houses on the market or would help them to compare various designs for a customized house. Similar systems are already in use in Japan and Spain, but the system proposed by BFRL would be much more broadly applicable.

Program Relevance and Effectiveness

OAE and the Standards and Codes Services activities are located in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory office because both activities are essential for the laboratory’s overall effort to facilitate the effective use of the laboratory’s results by its customers. In many instances, the divisions’ projects focus on measuring or analyzing advanced materials or methods to show how they are more reliable, more durable, or safer than existing options. Since these new approaches are often more expensive than current practices (or just different from them), the adoption of new technologies by builders and owners may hinge on the availability of easy-to-use tools to help them weigh complex trade-offs and determine whether (and why) a change might be desirable in a given situation. Also, the laboratory must be aware of the codes and standards environment in which new materials and methods will be applied; implementation may require demonstrating how new approaches are consistent with current regulations, or expanding existing standards, or even developing new codes.

The OAE’s decision-making tools have been adopted widely and in some cases are established as de facto national standards for effective evaluation of building construction options, as happened with the Building Life-Cycle Costing methodology, which is commonly used by DOE and the construction industry. The procedures that underlie the software packages allow users to explore trade-offs between one-time capital costs and extended operating and maintenance costs, while taking into account implied long-term benefits from enhanced reliability, greater safety, energy conservation, and less environmental degradation.

A key element in the success of OAE is that the staff always maintain a strong focus on their customers, the eventual users of NIST products. In projects, the first step is always developing a feasible mechanism to assist clients in reaching decisions in ways that are meaningful to them. Also, although many activities are part of long-term lines of investigation, work is usually structured in discrete pieces so that OAE can provide a number of useful new or upgraded software packages for its customers each year. OAE recognizes that decision-enhancing tools are of little value if not adopted by decision makers and therefore disseminates its results as computer software (on compact disks and/or as Internet downloads), with skillful visuals, user menus, and instructions. In fact, the software is so user-friendly that a recent prototype of a potential new product, the Durability Doctor, attracted substantial user attention even though the tool has not yet been fully developed.

A good example of how OAE effectively serves its customers is its long-term BEES project. Software developed as part of this project computes both economic and environmental indices to help designers weight these factors when choosing materials for construction. The second edition of the BEES software package has been released,7 and NIST staff have traveled around the country to deliver hands-on, interactive presentations to consumers and designers. Use of this tool is spreading in the United States and has begun to gain acceptance in the international building community. Further dissemination to other relevant communities and extension of the software might occur through partnerships with other NIST laboratories,

7  

Version 2.0 of the Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability (BEES) software is available online at <http://www.bfrl.nist.gov/oae/software/bees.html>.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

which could promote the tool to their customers and also might provide suggestions and expertise on potential new materials. Currently, the main issue for this activity is which building materials should be included in the NIST software. Originally, the BEES software was developed based on analysis of generic building products and materials (such as plywood and 15 percent fly ash content concrete). However, as the software becomes more widely used, manufacturers have asked NIST to include their products and to list them by brand name. The manufacturers are willing to pay for this privilege, but the question is, Where do appropriate efforts to provide building designers with scientific decision-making tools leave off and inappropriately commercial activities begin?

In the standards and codes area, the Building and Fire Research Laboratory could become a leader in reshaping the content of construction codes now in use and influencing the processes used to develop the construction codes and standards of the future. However, for this to occur, it would have to develop a long-range plan and seek out the technological innovations that are needed to support new, science-based approaches to standards and codes. The value of new regulations to the U.S. economy and to society at large hinges on balancing public safety concerns with the need to allow the implementation of new technologies without a lengthy approval process. For effective implementation of new technologies, measures of quality are needed to allow product comparison and substitution and to encourage technological innovation and the expansion of markets. For NIST to help the United States and the world move forward to a modern approach to codes and standards, the BFRL must do more than participate in the processes that set codes and standards; it must also identify and quantify the incentives so that interested parties can be convinced to embrace new approaches and quantum leaps in technology can be accommodated.

One example of the direction in which the laboratory might go is the proposed project on a system of quality metrics for housing. A strong proponent of this effort is a staff member who is involved with two organizations that are major players in the writing of international building codes and life safety standards. He is a respected member of committees that write codes and standards and of committees that review and assess codes and standards for incorporation into the construction industry, and he believes that a system of quality metrics for housing would help him bring a scientific approach to those processes. In addition, since the system would be targeted at home buyers, it could give the laboratory international exposure and make NIST a household word.

Division Resources

Estimated fiscal year 2001 funding for the OAE totals $2.0 million, of which $1.3 million is from external sources. As of January 2001, staffing included 11 full-time permanent positions, of which 10 were for technical professionals. In the standards and codes area, external funding for laboratory activities related to Performance Standards Systems for Housing, PATH, and HHI is roughly $1.09 million.

In both OAE and the standards and codes area, significant amounts of funding are from external sources. While this support clearly shows how highly the U.S. government values the skills of the laboratory staff, there are problems associated with this reliance on external support. The biggest problem is in the standards and codes area, where the loss of the principal investigator for a number of HUD grants leaves those programs, which supported work in several divisions, with an uncertain future.

In OAE, the staff are overcommitted, and the main resources-related challenge is finding talented, experienced personnel to supplement the current team. The most immediate need is to identify and hire a person versed in operations research and decision-making techniques, but regularly infusing the team with fresh, new talent is also important. Finding freshly minted Ph.D.s with the required combination of

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
×

economic training and instincts, familiarity with operations research tools, facility in computer simulation, and practical knowledge of the relevant technologies is extremely difficult. The growing use of graduate students as working interns is an effective, if slow, way of building talent.

MAJOR OBSERVATIONS

The panel presents the following major observations:

  • The panel continues to be impressed with the technical quality of the staff and the projects under way in the Building and Fire Research Laboratory.

  • The merger of the two fire divisions to form the new Fire Research Division was a good move, and it is beginning to have a positive effect on morale, focus, and financial stability within the laboratory’s fire-related programs.

  • A strategic plan is needed to define long-term goals for the laboratory and establish a uniform culture across the divisions. Such a plan should raise the understanding of laboratory objectives both inside and outside the laboratory. Increased focus on understanding customer needs and defining dissemination mechanisms early in projects would also enhance the laboratory’s impact.

  • Standards and codes determine how design and construction are done in this country, so to have an impact on building technologies, the laboratory needs to develop a plan for providing industry advocates with the technical tools and results they need to promote the use of scientific information in standards and codes development.

  • Because the laboratory depends on external sources for a significant percentage of its funding, it should have a policy for deciding which external funding opportunities should be pursued. This policy should be clearly communicated to staff and might also be used to help decide what levels of external funding are appropriate for the various laboratory programs.

  • Strong informal relationships among staff from different divisions are an important element of successful interdisciplinary collaborations. Management should explore mechanisms that let staff build familiarity with activities and personnel throughout the laboratory.

Suggested Citation:"7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory." National Research Council. 2001. An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2001. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10204.
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This volume represents the 42nd annual assessment by the National Research Council (NRC) of the technical quality and relevance of the programs of the Measurement and Standards Laboratories of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This report provides judgments regarding the overall state of the NIST Measurement and Standards Laboratories (MSL),and offers findings to further increase the merit and impact of NIST MSL programs. It also offers in-depth reviews of each of the seven laboratories of the MSL, with findings aimed at their specific programmatic areas.

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