The last time I had Xinyan on the show was in 2021, and we were all excited about the possibilities that AI could bring to Fire Safety Engineering and Smart Firefighting. Three years have passed, and while we are still excited, we can now talk about experiences. What worked and what did not? Where were the challenges, and what was simple? You can only learn that from brainstorming, you learn this by doing. Xinyan's team implemented dozens of algorithms for various projects, and it is this experience we try to explore today.

The episode is bitter-sweet. Even though considerable progress was made in the AI layer, it is still not possible to implement this in firefighting. The barriers that always separated fire science from firefighting are still in place, and it is even harder to cross them with such a novel approach. As always, communication is the key. However, in the midst of the research, a realization was made. AI does not work that great with humans, but works perfectly well with robots. This gives a beginning to a new chapter - AI-powered robotic firefighting, and hell, this is really exciting stuff.

Besides smart firefighting, we spend good time discussing use of AI in Fire Safety Engineering itself. Xinyan's team is developing practical tools to assist the designers and engineers, and they look promising. What is most interesteing is that the implementation of those tools reasembles how CFD was implemented back in the day - I have huge hopes for this technology.

If you want to read more about AI in PBD FSE, this is the paper you look for: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352710221003867#appsec1

If you want to learn more about the work of the PolyU X Fire Lab, learn more on their up-to-date webpage: https://www.firelabxy.com/

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Soot is perhaps the most complex product of combustion, and at the same time one of the most profound for our everyday fire safety engineering. The topic of soot is not getting much love in the world of fire science, so I’ve chosen to give you a broad introduction to this subject. In this episode of fire fundamentals we will go through:

· Soot creation from chemical perspective;

· Soot creation from practical perspective;

· Soot effects on radiation, toxicity and obscuration;

· Extinction coefficient and specific extinction coefficient;

· Soot yield and surrogate value of soot yield for complex fuels.

If you would like to follow up on this episode with some reading, I highly recommend:

· Bart Merci and Tarek Beji book „Fluid Mechanics Aspects of Fire and Smoke Dynamics in Enclosures”

· Jose Torero lecture “Prof. Jose Torero - Fire: A Story of Fascination, Familiarity and Fear” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIY0litILRA&t=2082s

· W. Węgrzyński and G. Vigne, Experimental and numerical evaluation of the influence of the soot yield on the visibility in smoke in CFD analysis – the paper with the source of our surrogate value of soot yield for complex fuels in fire safety engineering https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0379711217301327?via%3Dihub

· G. Mulholland, C. Croarkin Specific extinction coefficient of flame generated smoke https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/1099-1018%28200009/10%2924%3A5%3C227%3A%3AAID-FAM742%3E3.0.CO%3B2-9

· W. Węgrzyński, P. Antosiewicz, J. Fangrat, Multi-Wavelength Densitometer for Experimental Research on the Optical Characteristics of Smoke Layers, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-021-01139-5

· K. Börger, A. Belt, T. Schultze, L. Arnold, Remote Sensing of the Light-Obscuring Smoke Properties in Real-Scale Fires Using a Photometric Measurement Method, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-023-01470-z

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode of Experiments that Changed Fire Science we cover T. Jin’s experiments on the visibility in smoke – two experiments carried out in 1970 and 1971 in Japan that truly changed the way how we model fires and how we design fire safety in our buildings.

This episodes presents my recollection of Jin’s experiments, based on the published work – the seminal paper at the IAFSS in 1997 (https://publications.iafss.org/publications/fss/5/3/view/fss_5-3.pdf) and the original material published in Japanese in 1970 and 1971:

• Jin, T. (1970). Visibility through Fire Smoke (I). Bulletin of the Fire Prevention Society of Japan, 19(2).
• Jin, T. (1971). Visibility through Fire Smoke (II). Bulletin of the Fire Prevention Society of Japan, 21(1).

In the episode, I highlight the technical details of the experiments and their potential impact on the findings. I also present the overall model proposed by Jin, indicating the variables that influence it, and my recollection of how this model was implemented in modern fire safety engineering.

Further readings to this would be some of my papers:

• Węgrzyński, W., & Vigne, G. (2017). Experimental and numerical evaluation of the influence of the soot yield on the visibility in smoke in CFD analysis. Fire Safety Journal, 91(SI), 389–398. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2017.03.053
• Węgrzyński, W., Antosiewicz, P., & Fangrat, J. (2021). Multi-Wavelength Densitometer for Experimental Research on the Optical Characteristics of Smoke Layers. Fire Technology, 57(5), 2683–2706. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-021-01139-5

And a very recent paper by my collaborators from Wuppertal:

• Gnendiger, C., Schultze, T., Börger, K., Belt, A., & Arnold, L. (2024). Extinction coefficients from aerosol measurements. Fire Safety Journal, 146, 104110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2024.104110

Please also visit episode https://www.firescienceshow.com/030-visibility-prediction-framework-with-lukas-arnold/ with my friend Lukas Arnold, on how we intend to change the visibility prediction in fire safety engineering!

This research was funded in part by National Science Centre, Poland in the grant OPUS 2020/39/I/ST8/03159.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.