An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories Fiscal Year 2001 (2001) / Chapter Skim
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7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory
7. Building and Fire Research Laboratory
Pages 193-228
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7 Building and Fire Research Laboratory 193
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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.
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Construction Technology (Structures Division) , · High Performance Building Materials (Building Materials Division)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ~ , ...
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Division Resources A, 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.
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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.
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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.
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and analysis of how well 5The NIST Heat Transmission Properties of Insulating and Building Materials database is available online at |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 OAK and the standards and codes area, there are a number of projects recently completed, under way, or planned.
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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 OAK is that the staff always maintain a strong focus on their customers, the eventual users of NIST products.
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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.
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· 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.
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