"major advances in combating fire are unlikely to be achieved simply by continued application of the traditional methods"

The 3rd Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference organized by The International Association of Wildland Fire quote our dear Emeritus Professor in the first page of the call for papers. This is, indeed, bridging the gap between two fire disciplines.

http://www.iawfonline.org/spokane2010/call_spokane2010.pdf

"Further major advances in combating wildfire are unlikely to be achieved simply by continued application of the traditional methods. What is required is a more fundamental approach which can be applied at the design stage ... Such an approach requires a detailed understanding of fire behaviour ... "

D. Drysdale (1998) - An Introduction to Fire Dynamics (Second edition)

Congratulations to Dr Steinhaus, Dr Biteau and Dr Roben for their PhD thesis defenses

Congratulations to the three new Doctors of Philosophy from the fire group!

Thomas Steinhaus successfully defended his PhD thesis on the 9th of Nov 2009. The external examiner was Prof. Richard Hull from University of Central Lancashire, and the internal was Dr Guillermo Rein. The thesis title is "Determination of Intrinsic Material Flamability Properties from Material Tests assisted by Numerical Modelling" and he was supervised by Prof Jose Torero and Dr Stephen Welch.

Hubert Biteau defended his PhD thesis on the 21st of Dec 2009. The external examiner was Prof Jean-Pierre Vantelon from Ecole Nationale Superieure de Mecanique et D'Aerotechnique, and the internal was Dr Guillermo Rein. The thesis title is "Thermal and Chemical Behaviour of an Energetic Material and a Heat Release Rate Issue", and he was supervised by Prof Jose Torero and Prof Dougal Drysdale.

Charlotte Roben defended her PhD thesis on the 22nd of Jan 2010. The external examiner was Prof Ian Burgess from University of Sheffield, and the internal was Dr Tim Stratford. The thesis title is "The effect of cooling and non-uniform fires on structural behaviour", and she was supervised by Dr Martin Gillie and Prof Jose Torero.

Visit by Dr Fiorucci and seminar on wildfire risk

Paolo Fiorucci from CIMA (Univ. of Genoa, Italy) will give a lunchtime seminar on the 9th of February on "A general framework for wildfire risk assessment and management in Mediterranean area" in the AGB Seminar Room at 1.15 pm. Abstract bellow.

Paolo Fiorucci has a PhD in Environmental Monitoring. He is currently project leader at CIMA. CIMA is a Joint-Foundation between the University of Genoa and the Italian Civil Protection. It supports research in the field of civilian and environmental protection. His research interests focus on forest fire risk assessment and management by means of statistical analysis and dynamic model development. He is author and coauthor of more then 30 papers, 7 published in international refereed journals. He is also teaching assistant from 1997 supporting different courses on Modelling and Simulation, Natural risk management and Forest
Fires within the undergraduate courses on Environmental Engineering and Electronic Engineering at the University of Genoa. He has been and he his Scientific Director of several national and international projects.


A general framework for wildfire risk assessment and management in Mediterranean area

The analysis of time series of burned areas combined with a detailed knowledge of topography, land cover and climate conditions allow understanding which are the main features involved in forest fire occurrences and their behaviour. Based on this information it is possible to develop statistical methods for the objective
classification of forest fire static risk at regional scale. The analysis suggests that fire regime in Mediterranean ecosystem is strictly related with species highly vulnerable to fire but highly resilient, as characterized by a significant regenerative capacity after the fire spreading. Only rarely, and characterized by negligible damage, the fire affects the areas covered by climax species in relation with altitude and soil types (i.e, quercus, fagus, abies). On the basis of these results, it is proved how the simple Drossel-Schwabl Forest Fire Model is able to reproduce the forest fire regime in terms of number of fires and burned area.
On this basis, an experimental propagation model has been developed to provide Italian Civil Protection Department (DPC) with rapid active fire risk assessment maps. The propagation model is based on stochastic cellular automata. The model provides in a fast and simple way realistic scenarios useful for active fire management, highlighting the zones where the fire attack can be more effective. Several case studies proved that the model give better results in case of complex terrain and vegetation mosaic. In case of flat terrain and homogeneous fire dependent vegetation cover, the fire perimeter is mainly determined by meteorological variability (wind speed and direction) and fire attack. In fact, extreme fire hazard situations are strictly related with extreme weather conditions mainly related with very low relative humidity and strong winds. Such extreme situations are generally well defined by Numerical Weather Prediction Models up to 48 h before the event occurs. In this connection Fire Hazard forecast systems are able to anticipate the extreme fire situation up to 48 hours. The system RISICO provides Italian Civil Protection Department (DPC) with daily wildland fire risk forecast maps relevant to the whole national territory since 2003. The RISICO system has a complex software architecture based on a framework able to manage geospatial data as well as time dependent information (e.g, Numerical Weather Prediction, real time meteorological observations, and satellite data). Within the system semi-physical models, able to simulate in space and time the variability of the fuel moisture content, are implemented. This parameter represents the main variable related with the ignition of a fire. Based on this information and introducing information on topography and wind field the model provides the rate of spread and the linear intensity of a potential fire generated by accidental or deliberate ignition. The model takes into account the vegetation patterns, in terms of fuel load and flammability. Integrating in a single framework the complete suite of all the models introduced above it is possible to critically reduce fire risk thus preventing serious environmental damages.

Summer placement at Lothian & Borders Fire Service

“You, come wi’ me, we’ll go cut the door offa car”

Like many final year MEng students I didn't know what I wanted to do after graduation; so when Prof. Torero asked me if I wanted to do a PhD in Fire Engineering I thought, why not?

The only problem was that I had absolutely no idea what “fire engineering” was, so to do a PhD in it seemed a bit far-fetched. I asked what I could do to bring me up to speed. The answer? “Well, you could join the Lothian & Borders Fire Service if you want…”

So in July 2009, a couple of months before I was due to start my PhD, I walked into the Fire HQ with Jonny (a first-year UoE student) to begin our internship. I was wearing a shirt and tie as instructed; I signed in, got a name badge and waited for Bob (the fire-fighter tasked with looking after us for the next 6 weeks).

“Tea?” he says (fire-fighters seem to run on tea). “No? Right let’s head down to the ship.” I was soon to find out that he was referring to the Fire Training Centre – so named for the big old metal ship sitting in the back yard. After another cup of tea and a safety brief, we were kitted out with equipment and breathing apparatus (BA). By 10am we were following an instructor through smoke-filled compartments. We spent the next week crawling around that ship through heat, smoke, dirt and water, watching the fire fighters at work and doing some fire fighting ourselves. It was awesome.

On day three we were sitting in on a fire safety lecture when the boss opened the door, pointed at the two of us and said: “You two! Come with me.” He then turned to the instructor giving the lecture and said: “They won’t be back.” The next thing you know we were fully geared up in BA, blindfolded and put through the “crawling cages” – a sort of pitch-black, claustrophobic assault course. A wee bitty mental, but otherwise great fun.

The internship allowed us to see every part of what the fire service do. We got to take part in fire investigation, public education and a water rescue (involving wetsuits, ropes, a fast-flowing river and of course, a BBQ). We were even driven down the runways of Edinburgh Airport in a £750,000 fire engine.

By far the best part of the internship was being “on the run” at Sighthill fire station (I don’t think I ever really got over the novelty of the pole). Every day we would be called out to incidents or get to try out a new piece of equipment, ranging from ladders to foam cannons to the jaws-of-life. I’ll never forget it when a fire-fighter turned to me and said: “you, come wi’ me, we’ll go cut the door off a car.”

If nothing else, my internship with the fire service gave me a story to tell; sure I got an introduction into the world of fire engineering, but more importantly I got to live out every 5-year-old schoolboy's dream - to be a fireman! It was awesome.

by Mike Woodrow, 1st year PhD student

Visit by Dr Oliveras and seminar on fire dynamics and carbon losses

Dr. Imma Oliveras, environmental scientist at the University of Oxford, is visiting the fire group and will give a seminar to IIE on 4 Feb at 1pm in the Alexander Graham Bell Bldg (seminar room, 3rd floor).


Dr Oliveras is a Post Doctoral Research Associate working on the dynamics and carbon implications of fires. She is interested on how human-induced disturbances affect ecological processes, and implications for climate change and biodiversity conservation. She has studied the cloud forests of the Peruvian Andes, the Brazilian savannah grasslands and the Mediterranean ecosystems.


Seminar abstract:

FIRE DYNAMICS AND ASSOCIATED CARBON LOSSES IN THE PERUVIAN ANDES

Dr. Imma Oliveras
School of Geography and the Environment
University of Oxford


In the Andes, humid Tropical Montane Cloud Forests (TMCFs) sit immediately below highly flammable, high altitude dry grasslands (the puna) that have suffered from recurrent anthropogenic fires for millennia, with the treeline sitting at approximately 3000 m. This treeline is a zone of ecological and climatic tension: on the one hand, rising temperatures and cloud heights may have a tendency to push the ecotone upwards, encouraging forest expansion into the puna. On the other hand, increased aridity in the puna (driven by rising temperates and evapotranspiration, and possibly by reducing precipitation), coupled with intensified human pressure, is increasing fire occurrence and penetration into the cloud forest. This research project aims analyze the fire dynamics of this treeline, and to perform accurate estimates to carbon losses due to combustion by combining fire satellite detection, on-ground observations and experimental tests.

Christmas Tree Fire Safety

This is a fire test of a Christmas tree carried out in our lab. The tree had been in the home of one of our research students for a few weeks over Christmas time. No accelerants were used, this is simply the burning of the tree, ignited by a single candle which was allowed to burn down. The candle burned for 18 uneventful minutes before the start of the video clip.

The peak heat release rate of the fire was about 2.5 MW!

Please be careful with candles on Christmas trees next year!

Visiting researcher at Tokyo University of Science

Our PhD student Sung-Han Koo has been awarded an International Young Researcher Scholarship which will fund a 3-month visit to the Center for Fire Science and Technology in the Research Institute for Science and Technology at Tokyo University of Science, Japan. 

An exercise in peer review

A few years ago I was involved in the organisation of a conference. The selection process for speakers at the conference involved the submission of abstracts for the presentations / papers, which were reviewed by all members of the scientific committee, who ranked the abstract on a scale from 0 (reject) to 4 (excellent). The rankings of each of the reviewers were averaged for each paper and any paper with an average score of less than 2.0 was rejected.

Over a hundred abstracts were submitted and fewer than five papers were ultimately rejected from the conference.

Unbeknownst to the scientific committee, one of the submitted abstracts was a fake, created to test the review system. The abstract was written by the wife of one of the conference organisers, who knows very little about the field of Fire Safety Science. She was given a few recent copies of 'Combustion & Flame' and left to create a nonsense abstract, using words and phrases found in genuine abstracts.

The fake abstract read as follows:

Pressure, Elongation and Deformation Analysis of SB in Laminar Partially-Mixed Flames

M.W.Suzanne
Centre for Flame Research
Hayward, California
United States

Pressure effects, elongation rates and deformation coefficients on Soot Ball (SB) manipulation in peripheral fragmentation has been investigated in a thick-under chaotic-zones regime using non-compromising direct flame propagation models with physicochemical processes. It is commonly known that the effects of SB phenomena quantitatively as well as qualitatively perpetuate the growth rate, according to Chebyshev polynomials, of solid propellant flames and therefore follow an anisotropic analysis. An apparatus which simulates sufficiently high steam partial pressures was erected to deliver the thermo chemical conditions needed and much desired to approach the soot model studied in the present work. Internal gas velocity analysis in the flame region and the Guinier and Prodo-based scattering theory were essential elements to the development of this work. The Stochastic fields greatly contributed to thermal equilibrium between phases nevertheless allowing for heat transfer during the process of acceleration. Measurements of heat transfer serve to further evaluate the SB phenomena confirming the findings by Singh et al. (2006). Nevertheless, the deformations were observed to remain static.

The abstract received an average ranking of 1.7 from the scientific panel, relegating it to rejection. However, this was a better score than two genuine submissions and two members of the panel ranked the abstract with a score of 3!

Still, its good to know that peer review works. Sometimes.

Field trip to the ongoing smouldering peat fire in Las Tablas de Daimiel National Park, Spain

There is an ongoing peat fire in the National Park of Las Tablas de Daimiel, Spain.

Photo taken on November 25, 2009 in the area adjacent to the National Park, near Molimocho.

The peat in the Park is very dry at the moment (water content bellow 10 to 20% dry weight) after a prolonged drought and excessive irrigation of near fields that has lasted several years now. Under these dry conditions, peat smoulders readily (smouldering fires are known to spread at water content bellow 55% dry weight). Visually, only weak plumes of smoke can be appreciated in holes distributed over a surface area of 5 ha inside the Park and of 40 ha outside the Park. The real magnitude of the fire lies bellow the surface and no one knows the size of it.

This fire was detected first inside in Park in September 2009. But smoking signs of smouldering activity were detected earlier than that just outside the Park limits. The fire outside was caused by a flaming wildland fire extinguished in August but that left the peat smouldering. The cause of he fire inside the Park is currently unknown and a handful of hypothesis have been put forward (subsurface propagation from the outside fire, self-ignition phenomena, ignition from previous flaming fires, and endemic fire in the ecosystem).

Snapshot showing the two possible regimes of biomass burning: flaming of the grass and smouldering of the peat under it. For scale reference, the flame is about 10 mm tall. Figure from CATENA 2008

On the 25th of November 2009 I visited Las Tablas de Daimiel National Park with the Director of the Park Mr Carlos Ruiz, Dr Luis Moreno from IGME and the Fire Service Chief Officer in Castilla la Mancha.

The ongoing suppression, prevention and compartmentation tasks are innovative and effective. Note that peat fires are extremely difficult to tackle and the nightmare of fire-fighters. Indeed, little more can be done until the final solution of the global flooding (not partial) of the Park arrives in January 2010 (as agreed by national authorities).

Photo taken inside the National Park (Nov 25, 2009), showing heavy machinery stirring and compacting the soil down to a depth of 3 or 4 m.

I was specially impressed by the extent of the peat fire in the area adjacent to the Park and the novel large-scale prevention work compacting of the soil and local flooding from the surface. About 30 ha has been treated like this, stirring and compacting the soil down to a depth of 3 or 4 m with heavy equipment to prevent the spread of the fire. This prevention technique aims at cooling down possible hot spots and disrupting the dense network of natural pipes feeding oxygen to the deeper fire seats and carrying the smoke from the subsurface to the atmosphere. Nothing similar has been done before in other regions hit by smouldering fires (Borneo, British Isles, Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Iran ....)

Photo taken inside the National Park (November 25, 2009), showing the several hectares of peatlands that had been treated by compaction and stirring of the soil layers.

The day after, the 26th, I gave a seminar on Smouldering Fires at the ICAI School of Engineering, Madrid (the slides are accessible here).

Photo taken on November 25, 2009 in the area adjacent to the National Park, near Molimocho.

My comments on peat fires and visit to the Park was covered by Spanish media (for English, try funny translations here):

• 10/1/2010: "Spain Begins to Flood Park With Peat Fire", New York Times/AP.
  
  
• 27/12/2009: Un experto en fuego dice que la lluvia y el frío no solucionan el incendio de las Tablas de Daimiel. EFE/Publico.
  
  
• 26/11/2009: Un experto en fuego alaba el trabajo para apagar las turberas, EFE/ABC
  
  
• 26/11/2009: El incendio de Las Tablas ha podido emitir entre 10 y 40 toneladas de CO2 al día, EFE/CR Diario
  
  
• 26/11/2009: Only total flooding will solve the problem, Universidad Pontificia Comillas
  
  
• 14/10/2009: El fuego tiene combustible para arder durante años, El Pais

NOTE: Text and some photos are based on a prevoius post in my personal blog.

MSc Thesis is featured on the cover of Fire Risk Managament

The cover article of the last issue of Fire Risk Management is based on the thesis of our MSc student Anna M Jonsdottir (annamalfridur@simnet.is). It is a survey of 29 buildings in the University of Edinburgh quantifying how much of old and modern buildings is outside the range of applicability of the Eurocode for structures and fire.

This is the first time anyone explicitly tells how narrow is the Eurocode's design range for modern architecture.

The article is available in open access in ERA.

Abstract:
A survey of the University of Edinburgh campus underlines the narrow design fire specifications of the Eurocodes for many buildings. The limits set out in the Eurocodes are height less than 4 m, floor plan under 500 m2, amount of glass and thermal inertia not too high or too low, and no vertical openings. In the King’s Buildings, built over a long period of time with many of them from the early 20th century, 66% of the total volume is inside the limitations of the Eurocode. But in the Informatics Forum (a 2008 brand new modern building with lots of open spaces and glass facades), only 8% of the total volume is inside the limitations. One could say that modern building trends are once more moving out of the limits of our current understanding in fire dynamics.

Distinguished Paper Award from the Combustion Institute

The 2008 Distinguished Paper Award on Fire Research at the 32nd International Symposium on Combustion was given to the paper "Carbon Emissions from Smouldering Peat in Shallow and Strong Fronts" by Guillermo Rein, Simon Cohen and Albert Simeoni.

This prestigious award is given by the Combustion Institute to the paper in the Fire Research colloquia which is "judged to be most distinguished in quality, achievement and significance".

Figure: Depth vs. time sketch of a downward smouldering
front showing the evolution of the front structure.

The paper reports on a series of laboratory experiments measuring carbon emissions from smouldering fires of boreal peat. It provides a novel framework to study smouldering dynamics by varying the controlling mechanisms and providing burning conditions that otherwise cannot be obtained in the laboratory. The paper is available in open access in ERA.

HEC technology innovation award for FireGrid

Edinburgh students Sung-Han Koo & Sungwook Kang got the third prize HEC technology innovation award for their paper "Real-time fire prediction using sensors" on FireGrid.

Photo: Award reception of the 3rd Hyundai Engineering & Hankyung Technical awards. (From left to right) Co-chair of Hyundai Engineering, Sung-Wook Kang (MSc student UoE) and Bon-Ju Koo (father of Sung Han Koo, PhD student UoE).

The HEC is an award to post-graduate students who propose "technical renovation, new paradigms, new enterprise", conferred by Hyundai Engineering Co. Ltd. and Hankyung Economy (a media company); this was the third annual award.

Students Sung-Han Koo (BRE Trust/FireGrid PhD student) and Sungwook Kang (SAFE MSc student) submitted a technical paper related to the FireGrid project and were selected as one of the 14 finalists from about 70 initial entries.  They then presented the work in person in Korea on 15 October and were later announced as one of the 7 final prize-winners, being awarded the joint "third prize" (3 million KRW, c. £1500).

The work was supervised Dr Stephen Welch.

News on the Edinburgh Fire Digital Preservation Project

By Susan Deeny, PhD student.

Tao and Ania working on the Archive, 2009

In June of this year several post-grad students from the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Edinburgh delivered 1400 box files containing the BRE Fire Research Archive from BRE headquarters in Watford to the University of Edinburgh; proof that if a road trip is involved you can get a post-grad to do almost anything. Little did they realise that this delivery, a mammoth task, was just the first challenge in the ambitious project to digitise the archive to ensure the preservation and future dissemination of its contents.

Undaunted the students set about planning the digitisation process of the archive. The primary challenges were finance, equipment and man-power. The students successfully convinced the Edinburgh Small Projects Grant (funded by alumni donations to the University) that this project met their ‘innovation in teaching, research and student provision’ criteria and secured start-up funds. With this and top up funds from the BRE Centre for Fire Engineering, the students secured almost £5000. This was enough to purchase a scanner and employ two fellow students over the summer break to get the project started. The scanner the group settled on was an Atiz BookDrive Mini a v-shaped cradle scanner that employs two digital cameras for image capture; capturing up to 700 pages per hour. The cradle reduces curvature in the scanned image improving the success of optical character recognition software.

Two undergraduate students, Ania Grupka and Tao Gao were recruited over the summer to set up the equipment and develop a robust work flow. Once the scanner was installed and working, the team trained and the methodology set up (which took up most of the summer time), in the space of a month over 185 documents were captured, edited and converted to pdf format, which amounts to 11 of the 1400 box files the archive contains. Based on progress this summer the group are conservatively estimating that at this pace and current team, it will take 8 years to complete the digitising process which is somewhat longer than most students spend at University (in the UK anyway!), thus we are currently looking into ways of boosting the rate of workflow. Increasing productivity is currently the most significant challenge facing the group however many more exist including database development, digital storage and decisions concerning dissemination. Despite these challenges the group have made a significant start towards their goal of preserving and opening up the archive, they are learning fast and they remain undaunted (naïve?).

The BRE Fire Research Archive is a treasure trove of research conducted in the pioneering days of fire safety science. The intention of this project is to create an asset available to the entire fire community, therefore if you feel you can contribute to this project we are eagerly awaiting to hear from you.

Novel methodology to quantify wildland fuels' response to fire

The BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering at The University of Edinburgh has developed a methodology for quantifying the flammability of wildland fuels by adapting traditional fire calorimetry methods used to study the reaction to fire of industrial materials (ASTM standard). The methodology and its first application was published in 2007 and it is now being used in other places to improve knowledge of wildfire behaviour.

For this, a specific novel sample holder was designed and built in 2006 for the experiments. The sample holders is a basket made of stainless steel with holes on its walls (sides and bottom), to allow flow to pass through the bed of pine needles (see Figures 1 and 2 bellow). The sample is introduced into one of the two fire calorimeter (cone or FPA) for testing of the fire behaviour. It has been applied to Mediterranean pine needles, boreal moss and boreal peat samples so far.





Figure 1: Sample of live pine needles inside the novel sample holder with permeable walls.
Figure 2: Schema of possible flow of pyrolysis gases around and through the sample. Left) Using an impermeable wall holder in traditional calorimetry test. Right) Using the novel permeable wall sample holder in new tests for porous fuels.


The work, developed originally in 2006 as part of the FIRE PARADOX project (EU-FP7), has led to a PhD thesis and several papers. In chronological order, these are:

- A Calorimetric Study of Wildland Fuels, Proceedings of the 5th International Mediterranean Combustion Symposium, Monastir, Tunisia, 9-13. September 2007.

- A calorimetric study of wildland fuels, Experimental Thermal and Fluid Science, Volume 32, Issue 7, pp. 1381-1389, 2008.

- Transport Effects on Calorimetry of Porous Wildland Fuels, PhD Thesis by CF Schemel, 2008.

- Characterization of live and dead pine needles during combustion, Poster at 9th Symposium of the International Association of Fire Safety Science, Karlsruhe, Sept 2008.

- A study on forest fuel combustion dynamics using the Flaming Propagation Apparatus. European Combustion Meeting, Vienna, Austria, 14-17 April 2009.

- Determination of the main parameters influencing forest fuel combustion dynamics. 6th Mediterranean Combustion Symposium, Ajaccio, 7-11 June, 2009.

- Characterisation of Mediterranean vegetation by oxygen consumption calorimetry for forest fire hazards. 9th Mediterranean Conference on Calorimetry and Thermal Analysis, Marseille, 15-18 June 2009.

- Increased Fire Risk Associated with the Triassic-Jurassic Boundary Global Warming Event, The Geological Society of America, Annual Meeting, Portland, Oct 2009

Trial by Fire - comment on Willingham's trial

by Hans-Werner Wabnitz


The Willingham's trial story recounts a horrific tragedy. The story of a Texas State assassination. The failure of the legal system in a criminal arson case, where the “players” were induced into false intellectual security by self-content, even arrogant, arson investigators.

The case highlights several issues:

The necessity to have smoke detectors in every home / office, and the risk of using any open heat source (heater, stove).

The necessity that experts - here arson investigators - consider state-of-the-art scientific knowledge, as opposed to mere reliance on experience and folklore. Beware of hubris!

The problem that courts are being taken hostage by technical expert-witnesses (here a criminal court, but valid also for civil cases)

The failing of supposedly “fool-proof” legal institutions (not only in the US!) intended to guarantee “fair trial” and avoid the miscarriage of justice, because of human complacency.

The importance of well trained, smart, dedicated and resourceful lawyers, questioning “the obvious” and the assumptions underlying principal arguments - as well as finding a competent expert.



In the case a father of three young children who burned to death in a house-fire received the death penalty because arson investigators testified that the fire “must have been set by a liquid fire accelerator”. Later on a serious expert, having studied the evidence, concluded that this accusation was bogus and none of the “convincing evidence” held up to scrutiny.


This case may become the first documented capital punishment case in Texas (with shock-waves throughout the other US states still clinging to capital punishment) where a factually and legally innocent person has been put to death. Hopefully it will give the opposition to capital punishment enough ammunition to win their case.


The case highlights the risk of, and pitfalls caused by intellectual arrogance, even hubris, of the technical expert (arson investigator), and the serious damage it can cause. Here they were practitioners, but the same hubris aflicts professionals from academia as well - see the sure-footedness of economists explaining the markets over the last years. Engineers, relying on the “laws of nature”, as like to justify their findings, must be aware that this is not as simple as it sounds, and that the deduction of cause and effect always involves human logic, which may be fallible let alone being misguided by religious beliefs, such as advocating “intelligent design”). Lawyers face the same challenge, as they may easily misjudge the applicability of a rule to given facts.

All are prone to lack of rigor, to intellectual lethargy and reliance on the maxim: “that’s how we always did it”, instead of questioning the obvious, checking assumptions.


But the case also demonstrates the power, benefits and striking result of rigorous scientific research, relying on measured experiments and careful analysis. This approach freed another inmate from death row in a very similar arson case. Unfortunately it came too late for the accused in question here.



Hans-Werner Wabnitz
Dr. Jur. (Freiburg) LL.M. (Tulane. NO La)
HW at Wabnitz.com

Willingham's trial and the state of the art of forensic fire science

Via an op-ed article in the New York Times, I learnt about the story of Cameron Willingham.

The State of Texas executed Mr Willingham in 2004 for the deaths of his three children by arson at their family home. An arson investigation by Dr Craig Beyler conducted in 2009 says that there was no scientific evidence what so ever that the house fire was intentionally set but that all revised evidence points that it was an accidental fire. It is terrifying that the State of Texas may have executed an innocent man.

This is an upsetting and horrible story, from many points of view, but the one related to this blog is fire science. I think many people will also find it a required case study for those working in fire, to learn from past mistakes, improve the field and avoid repeating it at all costs.

The story is best told in this recent article by David Grann in The New Yorker:
*Trial by Fire: Did Texas execute an innocent man?*. There is also a summary video and an audio commentary.


Cheers
Dr Guillermo Rein


PD: The governor of Texas has replaced three members of that commission and is still saying in interviews that Willingham's execution was appropriate.

PPD: a community of about 30 volunteers has already been working on a public version of the events in wikipedia.

PPPD: The on-going case of Kevin Sweeney in the Netherlands is scarily similar to Willingham's. This case could be an accidental smouldering fire, which is my research expertise. I know first hand about the inability of many fire experts to see the importance of smouldering as the initiation event to a later flaming fire. That despite smouldering being the leading cause of fire deaths in residential areas in US and other western countries.

PPPPD: An important reading on the state of forensic science is the US National Academies report. A shorter piece that offers similar criticisms is in Popular mechanics.

Short Review of Workshops on Data Assimilation and Optimization, summer 2009

by Wolfram Jahn

A couple of months ago I had the opportunity to leave temporally the world of Fire Safety Engineering and attend two conferences related to the non-fire aspects of my thesis work: data assimilation and optimization.





The 8th International Workshop on Adjoint Model Applications in Dynamic Meteorology



The first conference, organized by NASA and with NSF support (who also provided a grant to pay for my expenses), was held in the little town of Tannersville, in Pennsylvania, USA, and was the International Workshop on Adjoint Model Applications in Dynamic Meteorology(18–22 May 2009).

While most of the talks of this conference were way out of the scope of my thesis (and many of them incomprehensible to my 'engineering' mind), a few of them were closely related to my thesis work, and I could get some very interesting ideas from them. Additionally to the talks there was a tutorial session which occupied most of the first day of the conference. This was made for PhD students who use functional data assimilation systems for numerical experiments, rather than develop them on their own. The 5h-tutorial covered all the basics of data assimilation and adjoint modelling, and was very helpful in terms of getting my hands on the things I had read on DA in various papers, and it filled the gaps resulting from my still growing mathematical knowledge.

Group photo at the Adjoint Worshop

On the last day of the conference I presented my work in the poster session. Being the only person at the whole conference without a meteorological background, I got a few 'what on earth is he doing?' looks, but generally the idea of using data assimilation concepts in other areas generated a great deal of interest, and people were very curious about fire modelling in general.

Overall, this workshop was very interesting and useful, and gave me the opportunity to talk to the most prominent people in the field of DA (e.g. Ronald Errico, Ronald Genaro, Jeff Kepert). On my return to Edinburgh, I could apply some of the newly acquired knowledge and thereby greatly simplify my problem, which accelerated my progress significantly. One of the things I realized at this conference was the immense amount of resources historically invested in the topic: so many people have worked in Data Assimilation in the last 50 years, and so many more issues are yet to be resolved. Applying all these concepts to Fire Forecasting is certainly going to take a few more PhDs....


EUROGEN 2009, ECCOMAS Thematic Conference

The second conference was EUROGEN, on Optimization and Control, was held in Krakow, Poland in June. It was organized by
ECCOMAS, ECROFTAC, and CIMNE. The conference was mostly focused on industry problems of optimization, and the very broad range of topics presented in the conference made it difficult to find talks even loosely related to my research. However, after presenting our work on inverse modelling of fire dynamics, I did get very positive feedback and people showed a lot of interest (for some reason people get very excited when they see FDS snapshots).

Photo: Audience of one of the talks (I am on the right)

The eternal question of whether it is better to use gradient based optimization, or whether evolutionary algorithms are the way forward, was very present at this conference. Unfortunately no real discussion on the subject could be established, since each party is absolutely convinced that they are right, and therefore the discussion is not necessary (this actually seems to be accepted by both parties). Even after enquiring on both sides I did not get any useful arguments that would justify preferring either methodology.

It is absolutely necessary at this point to mention the excellent organization of the conference with a very nice venue, outstanding food and an extraordinary gala-dinner at the oldest restaurant in Krakow (established in 1364). Obviously the charm of this beautiful city added its part to the success.

Design Icons at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat

by Prof. Jose Torero


As a Fire Safety Engineer, or someone who pretends to be one, I have many times complained that we work in a field that needs “Design Icons.” We have our icons in Fire Dynamics (H. Emmons, D. Drysdale, P. Thomas, J. Quintiere, etc.), we have our educational icons (J. Bryan, D. Lucht, D. Rasbash, etc.), we have our professional icons (B. Williamson, B. Nelson, etc.) and we have our design icon, Margaret Law. I unfortunately cannot think of any other design icon. I have enjoyed the immense pleasure of meeting or working with all of them but Prof. Rasbash, nevertheless I have always felt a professional void when it relates to design icons.

Today at the CTBUH 2009 Conference, I had a wonderful experience that made me feel humble and made me hope that one day our field will grow to be able to celebrate the achievements of three generations of design icons. I sat through presentations about structural design by Leslie Robertson, Charles de Benedittis, Gilberto doValle, Shankar Nair, Ron Klemencic and David Scott finishing with a presentation by Architect John Portman about architecture and structural design.



It was an afternoon that gave me something to think and forced me to reflect on the profession I chose. I have to admit that I felt envious of structural engineers but happy that we have a bright future ahead of us. It is in our hands to fill our profession with design icons, isn’t that a great privilege?

 

Congratulations for winning the 2009 Lord Ezra Award in combustion

Congratulations to the STAR team for receiving the 15th Lord Ezra Award for their innovative combustion technology to treat industrial soil pollution.

Photo (from left to right): Prof Jason Gerhard, Prof Jose Torero, Lord Howie of Troon, Christine Switzer, Guillermo Rein.

The award was given on 8th October 2009 during a lunch at the House of Lords, Westminster, by the UK Combustion Engineering Association for "outstanding achievement in the study of combustion engineering". The lunch was hosted by Lord Howie of Troon, Civil Engineer and MP.


The preceding David Gunn Memorial Lecture ‘Sugar the Energy Bill’ (Energy Efficiency at British Sugar) was presented by Paul Gardiner of British Sugar & Combined Heat & Power Association.


NOTE: this is the second Erza Award that goes to Edinburgh; Valentina Cvoro won the 2003 Derek Ezra Award.

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History of the Lord Ezra Award.


The invitation to the Award Ceremony contained the following description of the award:

Lord Ezra was very keen that CEA should continue to support the industry through education and training. He wanted to add his own
personal support and commitment to that end by offering a prize to encourage new entrants to the industry and new innovation where possible. Thus, in 1995, the Lord Ezra Award was initiated and presented each year. By way of further encouragement and
equitability, the Award is open to a large field and entrants are asked to submit competitively based schemes in order to actually win the award. The meritorious entrant or entrants receive the Award every October in the House of Lords.

Combustion Engineering Association, on behalf of Lord Ezra, is proud to present the Award and invites entries from a person or group of persons in combustion engineering who have created or facilitated a benefit to that industry, especially through a new, innovative or novel nature.

Entry for the Award is by nomination and may only be made by Combustion Engineering Association Members. The award is not restricted to one student or person only but can be to a team, group or department for example, providing the members fulfil the entry criterion.

CEA is especially keen to receive applications from students, graduates or trainees new to the industry. The project entry should of course be concerned with combustion, combustion engineering and related fields.

Entries may be of a pure scientific nature or technological development in product, process or plant. Entries are also welcome in the area of fuels, energy or major cost saving and project management.

Accordingly, the following are the Terms of Reference for the Award: Qualifying projects should be innovations in either: planning, design, manufacture, installation, utilisation and maintenance of energy consuming industrial plant. The innovation should achieve a significant measurable improvement or benefit in any one or preferably more of the following categories :
Safety, Reliability, Durability, Longevity, Efficiency, Economy, Environment, Emissions, Technical, Product, Process, Plant, Fuels, Management."

Edinburgh's fire experiment made banner of a prestigious research images exhibition

Claire Belcher's photo of a fire experiment carried on at Edinburgh is featuring now on a large banner outside Newman House in Dublin, Ireland!




The image entitled "Fuelling The Global Warming Debate" is part of an research images exhibition put together by University College Dublin Research and curated by: The Irish Research Centre (at Trinity College), Gerry O'Leary (award winning photographer) and Willie White (Artistic director, Project Arts Centre). The image selected for the prestigious exhibition was taken during Claire's visit in 2009 and shows a burning monkey-puzzle tree branch inside the state-of-the-art Fire Propagation Apparatus (FPA) in the fire lab of the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering. The experiments was being run by the PhD student Freddy Jervis.

The image is followed by the description "Global warming is expected to cause vegetation change. How these changes will alter wildfire activity is of increasing concern to researchers in the context of the threat to human life and ecosystems. This images shows the ignitability of different vegetation being tested using state-of-the-art fire propagation apparatus".



The UCD Research Images Exhibition 2009, part of Innovation Dublin festival, showcases a wide range of compelling images that have been created by researchers at UCD and their collaborators during the course of their research. The images on display have been submitted by researchers at all levels (PhD student to Professor), across a range of disciplines in UCD, from Arts and Human Sciences, to Engineering and Life Sciences. The Exhibition, which is open to the public, features the most innovative and imaginative research images that convey the depth and range of research taking place at UCD. The exhibition is being held over the next week at Newman House, 85-86 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland.

by Dr Claire Belcher (biogeochemist at University College Dublin working on mass extinction events, fire ecology, palaeowildfires, and ancient atmospheres).