The U.S. Department of Energy officially thanked University of Utah research scientists Wednesday for creating state-of-the-art computer imaging techniques that allow scientists to study fires and explosions — from a can of gasoline to a bomb going off near a nuclear missile silo — from the inside.

When the five-university research group was selected in 1997 and underwritten by a $250 million energy department grant, the ultimate goal was to give the government tools to simulate nuclear weapons tests, which are banned by treaty.

At the U., the effort became the Center for the Simulation of Accidental Fires and Explosions. It began pushing the science of simulation into new realms that called for unprecedented computing capacity that founders weren't even sure could be created, let alone be up to the task of tracking the behavior of fires and other defense worst-case scenarios.

"Before we started this effort, the state of simulation technology was to have a computer do what you know really happens in nature, and simulations were unable to predict what you don't know," said C-SAFE co-director and U. chemistry professor Chuck Wight. "One of the major contributions of C-SAFE we can point to is the design science-based tools that allow simulations to predict behavior that is unknown."

The U. has helped meet the great challenge of computer simulation — predicting events reliably that are too big, expensive, and/or dangerous to perform experiments on such as a major fire on the space station, in a coal mine, or on an aircraft carrier, said Dimitri Kusnezov, the director of safety programs with the National Nuclear Security Administration.

"When this started there was no industry to turn to," Kusnezov said. "The intellectual base of how to take on the project didn't exist and we didn't even know if the idea of paralleling the computers to handle the large- scale computing necessary to allow us to get to do the imaging would work."

The project required a paradigm shift on a number of levels, Kusnezov said, noting that "Stockpile Stewardship" after testing was banned meant models had to be developed for evaluating the condition and possible deterioration of the country's nuclear arsenal.

Bringing together a kind of super-group of computational, chemical and mechanical engineers 11 years ago has led to the creation of a host of tools for the numerical simulation of accidental fires and explosions. Those can be done under nearly every possible circumstance without having to risk what one former U. rocket scientist calls "an actual unanticipated spontaneous event."

"We have a generation growing up without a Cold War mentality now who fortunately might not understand the importance of this kind of effort," he said. "That's nice that the nuclear clock has stopped ticking, but that has been possible in part by the tool sets developed in this project that affords us a stockpile stewardship that used to involved testing in Nevada, interpolating the results and preparing for the next test."