No. 549 March 2012 

MFIRE 3.0 - NIOSH Brings MFIRE into 21st Century 

Objective 

Improve the U.S. Bureau of Mines MFIRE mine fire 

simulator program by modernizing the programming 

language and incorporating improvements in fire and 

contaminant spread modeling made since its original 

development. 

Background 

The use of computer codes for assessing and 

predicting, in real-time, the impact of fire on the mine 

ventilation system and the spread of fire contaminants in 

coal and metal/nonmetal mines offers significant potential 

for improved safety and chance of success during 

evacuation and control. The MFIRE program, developed 

in the 1970’s by the U.S. Bureau of Mines and Michigan 

Technological University, has been a mainstay in the 

modeling of ventilation and fire contaminant spread. It is 

used by U.S. and international companies to simulate fires 

for planning and response purposes. It is a dynamic, 

transient-state, mine ventilation network simulation 

program that performs normal planning calculations. It 

can also be used to analyze ventilation networks under 

thermal and mechanical influence such as changes in 

ventilation parameters, external influences such as 

changes in temperature, and internal influences such as a 

fire. The program output can be used to analyze the effects 

of these influences on the ventilation system. However, 

the program language and architecture are considered 

antiquated by current computer standards. Advances in 

personal computing operating systems have limited the 

use of the original program. In addition, the original 

program is not compatible with other Graphical User 

Interface (GUI) simulation tools. There is a clear need to 

modernize and improve the program to bring the program 

into the 21st century. 

A conveyor belt fire in the NIOSH Fire Suppression Facility. 

Summary of Improvements 

The original MFIRE is a stand-alone program that runs 

to completion without pause, based on the input 

parameters. Because of this, it is difficult to use its 

ventilation and fire modeling capabilities within larger 

simulation projects as it is not possible to collect and 

process intermediate results. To overcome this limitation, 

NIOSH completed a major redesign and restructuring of 
MFIRE. The program was split into a front-end with a 

simple graphical-user-interface (GUI), and the MFIRE 

“engine” back-end. MFIRE 3.0 was rewritten as a 

discrete event simulation library so it can be used to 

simulate the progress of mine fires over time, under the 

control of user inputs through the GUI. MFIRE’s 

outdated programming language was replaced with an 

object-oriented C++ approach for ease of future 

maintenance. A key aspect of the redesign was that third 

party developers can obtain ventilation network data from 

the common memory rather than the default MFIRE data 

output files. This allows developers to use their GUI’s to 

display the progression of changes to the mine ventilation 

network. Finally, other improvements to MFIRE were 

made to increase the size of mine ventilation networks that 

can be modeled, improve capture and processing of 

runtime errors, add the ability to report results in both 

imperial and metric measurement units, and to utilize 

more user-friendly names for data structures. 

MFIRE Graphical User Interface screenshot.

 Resulting Product 

MFIRE is now modernized with an updated 

programming language and many new features to improve 

its usability and functionality. It can be used as a standalone tool for mine ventilation professionals and can also 

be integrated into other ventilation simulation tools. 

MFIRE 3.0 is available on the NIOSH Web site at 

http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/mining/products/product204. 

htm.

With its new design, a future step may be to interface 

MFIRE 3 with warning and communication systems, 

interactive graphics displays, and real-time atmospheric 

monitoring input, to provide a comprehensive solution for 

fire detection, alarm, and response. 

For More Information 

For more information on MFIRE 3.0, contact Alex C. 

Smith (ASmith@cdc.gov) or the Health Communications 

Coordinator (OMSHR@cdc.gov), NIOSH Office of Mine 

Safety and Health Research, P.O. Box 18070, Pittsburgh, 

PA 15236-0070. 

To receive NIOSH documents or for more 

information about occupational safety and health topics, 

contact: 1-800-CDC-INFO (1-800-232-4636), 1-888-

232-6348 (TTY), e-mail: cdcinfo@cdc.gov, or visit the 

NIOSH Web site at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh

Mention of any company name or product does not 

constitute endorsement by the National Institute for 

Occupational Safety and Health.

DHHS (NIOSH) Publication No. 2012–127