Dr. Lautenberger's primary research interest is computer modeling of fires and related solid-phase (pyrolysis) processes. He has several years of experience working with NIST’s Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) in research/academic environments and applying FDS in support of performance-based design of the built environment or for fire litigation cases. His MS thesis involved extending FDS to simulate soot formation/oxidation and flame radiation in laminar and turbulent diffusion flames. His Ph.D. dissertation involved formulation and coding of a generalized pyrolysis model to simulate the pyrolysis and gasification of a variety of solid combustibles encountered in fires, development of a material property estimation technique to quantify solid combustibles in terms of the material properties needed by this pyrolysis model, and fire development modeling over a range of length scales using this pyrolysis model coupled to FDS.

Chris is now working at UC Berkeley as a post doctoral researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the Combustion Processes Laboratory. His research project, "Tackling CFD Modeling of Flame Spread on Practical Solid Combustibles," (PI Carlos Fernandez-Pello) is funded by the National Science Foundation through August 2010. As part of this work, techniques initially proposed in his dissertation to estimate material properties from flammability test data will be extended and improved. This aspect of the work will disseminated via Google Code, see http://code.google.com/p/gpyro for details. The ultimate goal of this research is to tackle CFD-based prediction of room-scale fire growth on real world fuels.

All requests for fire-related consulting services are now handled through Reax Engineering.