The Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions (C-SAFE)

A DoE Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Center

[C-SAFE was officially decommissioned in November, 2010. However, there are a number of continuing projects built upon the C-SAFE legacy. These include the Uintah project (www.uintah.utah.edu), the University of Utah's Institute for Clean and Secure Energy's (ICSE) NNSA project (www.icse.utah.edu), and the Army Research Laboratory's Uintah-CRA.]

The Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions, created through the Department of Energy's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program, employed a large number of a highly skilled faculty, research scientists, staff, and students who created the Uintah Computational Framework (UCF) software. For over a decade C-SAFE produced cutting edge research in simulating complex physical phenomena including reacting flows, material properties, multi-material interactions, and atomic level chemistry. Additionally, pioneering work was done in the field of parallel computing, software frameworks, and visualization.

Some of the many contributions C-SAFE scientists have made include detailed research into large eddy simulations (LES) of reacting flows, immense combustion simulations, heat transfer studies, validation and verification with uncertainty quantification of simulation results, methods for modeling radiation in complex fire simulations, expansion and validation of the material point method (MPM), advanced chemical models of soot formation and deposition, and composite material modeling. Furthermore, the physcial science research has been greatly augmented by the underlying software framework on top of which it is developed.

Scaling to tens of thousands of processors (or more), the Uintah software continues to be refined and updated. The development of the UCF continues through a number of supplemental funding sources due to the utility of the software. While developed primarily to run fire/container interaction simulations, Uintah has been straighforwardly applied to many other diverse applications, including simulations of blood vessel growth, foam micro-structure, human torso dynamics, industrial flares, vehicle armor plating, and oil drilling applications.