News

PyroSim and Pathfinder 2020.4 bring many new features. Here is a quick look at the biggest additions. View the full release notes for PyroSim and Pathfinder. Read More...

Our support team has been assisting Szymon Matkowski with his recent project based on a feasibility study, completed by a team at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, of possible layouts and technical solutions for a theoretical base on Mars. The study was part of a competition sponsored by The Mars Society in which the ... Read More...

Pathfinder 2020.3 further enhances the user's ability to model social distance behavior as a method to address pandemic safety. Social Distance has been completely separated from Comfort Distance. Now, rather than Enable Forced Separation in the Simulation Parameters (retained in 2020.3 for legacy files), Social Distancing has its own selection field in the Advanced tab of the Edit Profiles dialog. With this recent development, occupants exhibit less "jostle" or "jitter" while smoothly and effectively maintaining distance. Read More...

We are just five weeks away from the first virtual edition of the Fire and Evacuation Modeling Technical Conference. Due to the ongoing global health crisis and travel restrictions, FEMTC 2020 will be presented in a streaming format including live Q&A and attendee networking by video chat. FEMTC 2020 is the 5th edition of the Fire ... Read More...

Most Users can Skip this Post This post addressed a problem that occurred with in FDS and PyroSim for versions 2019.1 through 2020.2. During that time period, if a model had more meshes than available processors and the user selected the default Run FDS Parallel option, the last processor would be assigned all excess meshes and ... Read More...

We are excited that we have already received many compelling abstracts for the Fire and Evacuation Modeling Technical Conference 2020 (FEMTC). As the global situation developed in March, Thunderhead Engineering decided that FEMTC 2020 will become a virtual event. Many have asked for remote opportunities in the past and there is no better time to ... Read More...

* The features described in this article are now available in Pathfinder 2020.2 and later versions. The global spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and associated COVID-19 sickness has profoundly changed human interactions in a matter of weeks.  It will likely be several more weeks until the first wave of illness is under control.  Modeling how these interactions ... Read More...

We recently had a question about modeling vertical ladders in Pathfinder. This post will describe the details of how to accomplish this. This question came from Saqib Mehmood of Aalborg University in Denmark, who was modeling wind turbine evacuation. Saqib Mehmood was joined on this project by a team including Anders S. Kristensen, Francisco Manuel ... Read More...

Thunderhead Engineering is located in the Flint Hills of Kansas in the center of the United States. Eighty-five million years ago, a vast ocean covered Kansas and left deep layers of limestone that make the hills impossible to cultivate. Fires ignited by Native Americans and lightning maintained the grassland, destroying shrubs and trees and letting ... Read More...

As of the time of this writing (late March 2020), the 2020 Fire and Evacuation Modeling Technical Conference (FEMTC) is still planned for September 9-11, 2020 in Brno, Czech Republic.  With the event still five months away, it is difficult to anticipate what meeting and travel restrictions will exist in the fall.  However, as the ... Read More...