Fin's and Candle's Creative Contests

Engineering can be the most creative profession, but we engineers are in general not the best communicators nor the best at appreciating artistic work.

I always want to build on this issue and encourage a bit my engineering students' appreciation of communications and the arts. So this academic year, as in previous years, I started the courses with a Creative Contest, for both ME2 Heat Transfer, and IDX Combustion Science modules that I teach at Imperial College.

The instructions to participate were the following:

 "I have two extra copies of textbooks to give away. If interested, send me a poem, comic, drawing, painting, song, video, or anything creative that explains why you are taking this module. Art, wit and humour are allowed, even encouraged".

 
I show below the submissions. I was the sole jury and found two winners (the first two shown for each contest). Congratulations to the winners (I wish an extensive use your awards).

Fin's Creative Contest in ME2 Heat Transfer.

 

Candle's Creative Contest in IDX Combustion Science.

 

Previous years

2015 Fin's and Candle's Creative Contests in ME2 Heat Transfer and ME4 Combustion
2014 Fin's and Candle's Creative Contests in ME2 Heat Transfer and ME4 Combustion

The Fire Navigator: smoke and flame sensors in smart buildings

The Fire Protection Engineering magazine has recently published our article reporting exciting research on the theme of smart buildings and fire protection. In this work, sponsored by Chief Donald J. Burns Memorial Research Grant, my student Nahom and I developed an algorithm that uses data arriving from building sensors to detect and map an ongoing fire. The algorithm, called the Fire Navigator, then provides forecasts of future smoke and flame spread within the building, allowing to see where and how the fire would propagate if not stopped before hand.

We envision that the forecasting of fire dynamics in buildings will lead to a paradigm shift in the response to fire emergencies, providing the fire service with essential information about smoke propagation and flame spread ahead of time (i.e. minutes before it happens). Disposing of information on fire events before they actually happen would have a positive effect on the fire service efficiency and safety, therefore saving human lives and mitigating property losses and environmental damage. Smart buildings anticipate the occupants’ needs with the help of various sensors. Control of heating and air conditioning, energy consumption and lighting are now common examples of how sensors allow control over key aspects of the built environment. We want to extend this to fire safety engineering and enhanced fire fighting. Already existing smoke and heat sensors, as well as sprinklers, generate data that has yet to be harnessed and used in smart buildings. This is what our article proposes and shows how to do it.

Our work is based on combining new and old ideas. The new ideas are the use of a very quick fire model based on cellular automata theory, and the integration of  the whole system into building information models (BIM). You can read the full article at the SFPE website:

The Fire Navigator: Forecasting the Spread of Building Fires on the Basis of Sensor Data 


NOTE: This research was sponsored by SFPE and Bentley Systems via the Chief Donald J. Burns Memorial Research Grant. We thank Arup, specially Judith Schulz, for sharing their expertise in BIM and fire protection systems, and thank KPF for permitting the use of their architectural BIM models.

PhD Studentship in Heat Transfer at Imperial College London

Applications are invited for a PhD studentship in the field of heat transfer and artificial intelligence funded by EPSRC and Arup.

2013 facade fire in Grozny. Photo from huffingtonpost

The research project, named INERSKIN, will develop a toolkit for fire safety optimisation of building façades. With a drive for thermally efficient buildings and sustainability, flammable insulation materials like polymers are more frequently introduced in the design of façades system. Because of the importance of façades and the increasing number of high rise buildings worldwide, it is critical that the interaction of materials and their performance in the event of a fire is understood, modelled and improved. INERSKIN will use artificial intelligence techniques and the state of the art of computational heat transfer to optimize their fire safety.

The student will join the Hazelab, the multidisciplinary research group led by Dr Guillermo Rein and part of the Thermofluids Division in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The purpose of the group is to reduce the worldwide burden of accidental fires and protect people, their property, and the environment. To do so, Hazelab studies computationally and experimentally heat transfer processes, condensed-phase chemistry and thermodynamics of reactive solids.

You will be an enthusiastic and self-motivated person who meets the academic requirements for enrollment for the PhD degree at Imperial College London. You will have a degree in engineering or physics, and an inquiring and rigorous approach to research together with disciplined work habits. Interests in heat transfer and artificial intelligence are essential. Good team-working and communication skills are essential. Knowledge in fire science and building design are encouraged but not essential prior the project.

Candidates should fulfill the eligibility EPSRC criteria for stipend and fees (UK resident for at least 3 years). Please check your suitability at the following web site: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/skills/students/help/Pages/eligibility.aspx

For further details of the post, contact Dr Guillermo Rein g.rein@imperial.ac.uk with up-to-date curriculum vitae.

Closing date: 30th April 2016.

Improved travelling fires for structural design

The collapse of 1WTC, New York City, 10:28am Sept 11, 2001.
Photo by 9/11 Photos CC BY.

Our latest paper on travelling fires for structural design has been published in Structures (journal of IStrutE) with the title Improved formulation of travelling fires and application to concrete and steel structures.

Note: It is open access so you can read and share it without need for a subscription. We have posted in open access also our Matlab code to calculate the fire temperatures in zenodo.


Accidental fire can be disastrous, especially in buildings. The effect of fire on structural stability is critical in regard to safe evacuation and safe access for fire fighters, financial losses, and lost business. This is particularly the case in tall buildings where extended evacuation times are required due to phased evacuation practices. The World Trade Centre Tower fires in 2001 have highlighted the need of a more realistic design tools to represent fires in large compartments. 

Innovative architectural designs of modern buildings already provide a challenge to structural engineers. This is above all the case in structural fire engineering. However, most of the understanding and current design codes are based on the assumption of uniform fires in a compartment. In previous work, we have shown that fires in large, open-plan compartments, typical of modern architecture, travel from one part of it to another with non-uniform temperature distribution. These fires are referred to as travelling fires. And Travelling Fires Methodology (TFM) has been developed to account for the travelling nature of fires.

Illustration of a travelling fire and distribution of gas temperatures.

TFM was born in 2010 and offers a paradigm shift in the structural engineering of modern buildings. The concept has already been applied by engineering firms like Arup, BuroHappold or AECOM in the design of a dozen of iconic buildings in the UK (including the renovation of Battersea Power Station in London). TFM accounts for one of the fastest knowledge transfers from research to industry seen in fire protection engineering. TMF is now being studying in detailed in the USA for possible adoption as well.

The focus of this latest paper is on the improvement of the calculations of traveling fire (iTFM) to account for better fire dynamics, and the analysis of the effect on structural members. The proposed changes represent a simple yet powerful fire model. In particular, our paper shows that:

• Using data from experiments and real fires, we limit the range of possible fire sizes thus reducing the time required for conduct TFM studies.
• Analytical expressions are presented for generating time–temperature curves which are independent of grid size (previous versions of TFM) and can be easily calculated with any mathematical tool. 
• Introduction of flapping term leads to reduced near-field temperatures for smaller fire sizes which cover a range between 800 and 1200 °C, as observed in real building fires. 
• The location of the peak temperature in the compartment is found to occur at the end of the fire path (i.e. far half of the compartment from the ignition source).

Welcome Nils to Imperial Haze Lab

July was the first month of Nils Roenner at Imperial College London as a new PhD student in m group. He joins the Imperial Haze Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Nils is from Germany. He has just graduated with an MEng degree in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College. In his final year project, he studied numerically the pyrolysis and ignition of polymers subjected to transient irradiation. During his degree, he has also work on a novel device for energy recovery from wood burning stoves. During the summers, he hold internships in several companies, spanning the foundry, mechatronics and electronics sectors.

The preliminary title of his thesis is "Experimental Investigation on the Boosting of Flame Retardancy in Thermoplastics" and is funded by BASF, Germany. The aim of the thesis is to provide a better understanding of the fundamental chemical and heat transfer processes involved in the ignition of thermopastics. In this work, Nils aims at improving the prevention of residential and industrial fires.

G3E4O Geoengineering and the Engineers of Gaia

Earthrise seen by the Apollo 8 crew, 1968. Credit: NASA

Blog by Nils Roenner and Guillermo Rein, Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London.

Because of global concerns on climate change, engineers are called to have a leading role in tackling the problem, and a new discipline is being proposed: Geoengineering (G₃E₄O(IN)₂R).
The realisation that man has an impact on Earth has led to the idea of the Anthropocene which signifies the current geological epoch, ‘the recent age of man’. Humans are being viewed as a factor and intricate part of nature. This is in agreement with Dr Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, introduced in 1979, a revolutionary view of the Earth not as a simple accumulation of systems but as one self-regulating system encompassing everything, including life.

Sketch of the Earth as system of systems with interdependencies and feedback lines outlined. Adopted from Rial et al. 2004 (10.1023/B:CLIM.0000037493.89489.3f).

In an article we wrote in 2013, The Engineers of Gaia, by using the concept of Gaia and the Anthropocene as starting points, we argue that the control system view of Earth is a vital part of geoengineering. It is not about one mechanism, it is about the self-regulating system as a whole. But if geoengineering was to apply a forcing too large or at the wrong place, such that positive feedback loops overtake, the results could be drastic and unpredictable. Careful and robust control is required when engineering something as vital as the system Earth, and this argument is often invoked to stop geoengineering proposals. Paraphrasing Prof Henry Petroski, for us, the premise would be that geoengineers welcome all the relevant science they can muster, but cannot wait for complete scientific understanding before acting to save life or create a new planet-saving technology. We also maintain that up until the moment when adequate understanding and models of the system are found only reversible and well controlled geoengineering interventions should be applied on a large scale, in order to prevent uncontrollable feedback being set off or reaching tipping points by accident.

The term geoeneering has only recently gained traction in the public debate, and its definition still varies according to the source. We think this can be defined as the large-scale anthropogenic intervention into the system Earth in order to adjust planetary mass and heat transfer processes, such that global catastrophes can be mitigated. Geoengineering opens up a broad range of measures with which global climate change can be tackled. No geoengineering approach should be viewed as a single solution to all of the problems associated with climate change. Most likely a combination of approaches will yield long term success. 

Our article briefly evaluates four promising applications of geoengineering using a set of criteria by which geoengineering proposals can be evaluated in term of feasibility, effectiveness, safety, geointervention, and costs.  These are summarized here:

Carbon Capture and Storage is a good option for rich countries aiming at reducing its CO2 emissions from power plants. Apart from its high cost, this method is very feasible and effective with low levels of geointervention and risks.

Biomass Burial is a good option for countries that have suitable and extended land. It is a lower cost approach and can be scaled up to have a larger impact. Low cost, feasibility, effectiveness and low levels of geointervention speak in favour despite some risks, like fire, which need to be managed.

Iron Fertilisation of oceans is an option for countries with coastal access. The low cost involved and the proven feasibility make this method appealing. But concerns about low effectiveness, high level of geointervention and high risks question the validity of the approach.

Cool Roofing of Building is a good approach for densely populated areas or countries with high annual level of sunshine. The low cost, risks and level of geointervention of this feasible option are attractive but on the other hand, it has a weak effectiveness and cannot control secondary effects.

Illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of the proposals under study.

It can be said for all geoengineering proposals, that due to our incomplete understanding of all feedback and threshold points in the global system of the Earth, the topic has to be approached with great caution. But its potential in helping to solve the great problem of climate change, make the efforts put into research and experiments worthwhile.

  Read here: "The Engineers of Gaia: Treating the Earth as a System for Geoengineering Solutions"

Welcome Francesco to Imperial Haze Lab

Today was the first day of Francesco Restuccia at Imperial College London as new PhD student in m group. He joins the Imperial Haze Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Francesco is from Italy. He became  a Mechanical Engineer from the University of Edinburgh in 2012, and then obtained an MSc degree from California Institute of Technology in 2014. At Caltech, Francesco studied numerically the problem of accidental ignition of liquid fuel tanks. At Edinburgh, he worked on smart distribution networks and renewable energies. He also spend time conducting experiments at CERN Cryogenics.

The preliminary title of his thesis is "Computational Study of Porous Reactive Media" and is funded by EPSRC. The aim of the thesis is to provide a better understanding of fundamental smouldering phenomena to aid in the mitigation and prevention of peat and coal fires. This is frontier research at the interface between combustion science and Earth sciences.

Reply to 'FDS and the Challenge of Big Data'

While on the Tube's District Line from the office, I read the most recent blog article written by the developers of FDS. It is titled "FDS and the Challenge of Big Data".

For those of you who do not know it, FDS stands for Fire Dynamics Simulator, and it is the state of the art in fire modelling. It is a fine, advanced and excellent code of Computational Fluid Dynamics  (CFD), especially developed to simulate the behavior of flames and smoke in buildings and large open spaces. Its source code, in FORTRAN, is open and freely avaible to all. The work of development and maintenance is mostly carried by staff at NIST (VTT at Finland also plays a major role). NIST stand for National Institute of Standards and Technology, and it is a USA government agency which mission is to "promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing science and technology".

Their blog article is mostly a complain. It is formulated around the apparent lack of good collaborations from academia around the world to support their difficult task of developing and maintaining FDS. They think the reason for this is down to the "publish or perish" stereotype, and use a blog article from a Cosmology researcher who expresses similar frustrations with academia.

I have four points to make regarding the FDS blog article:

0) Thank you. I felt bad that you think your contributions go thankless.This is unfair, because FDS is the state of the art, it is provided without cost and openly for all around the world to use. It has tremendously helped the Fire Safety Engineering community to develop further.

1) Test You Hypotheses. You should make sure you know and understand your potential collaborators, specially before you criticize them in the open. For example, the "primary currency of the academic reward structure" in engineering departments is funding and industrial relevance, not published papers. Be aware of using a Cosmology case to run your arguments against academic users of FDS who are mostly from engineering departments. Also, note that there are more jobs for research in Cosmology than for research in Fire Safety, so I find your final kick "there are only so many jobs available in cosmology" ill suited to the critique.

2) More Carrots. Find some of the true rewards that match the motivation of your potential collaborators. For example, I suggest you create the yearly NIST Award for Outstanding Contributions to FDS. This would create recognition and esteem which are highly valued in academic CVs, more than a bunch of papers, and in some cases it is the key for obtaining a position or promoting.

3) Elephant in the Room. Lets we forget that academia has played an essential role in the success of FDS, maybe also a thankless task. I have said in the past [*] that I believe the industrial success of FDS lies on three pillars; it is free, it is excellent for research, and there are hundreds of papers showing good modelling results (just google it). The third point is because no other fire code has ever received so much publication attention. The difference with other fire codes being of two orders of magnitude. This very high number of journal papers and the multiple open discussions taking place in any fire conference every single year have promoted somehow the image that FDS is 'the validated', 'the accepted' or 'the standard' model for a wide range of industrial designs. And industry uses FDS extensively, in thousands of fire protection projects worldwide in any one year, with the approval of the corresponding authorities. Hence, FDS contributes to fulfill the mission of NIST, and promotes innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing science and technology, in the USA and also in the rest of the world. This industrial projection is thanks to all the research users of FDS who decided to publish and go public at some point. Thanks go to them too.

[*] Advantages and Disadvantages of Fire Modelling, Irish Chief Fire Officers Association Annual Conference, Dundalk, May 2012.

Fin's and Candle's Creative Contests: towards the motivation of engineering students

We engineers are in general not the best communicators nor the best at appreciating arts. These are not really topics of interest during university studies in Engineering Schools around the world. This was the theme of a latest editorial in Ingenia, the magazine of the Royal Academy of Engineering, where Dr Steedmand said "Engineers are rarely taught about public engagement and as a result are often criticised for lacking communication skills. A few engineers, through their work, do spend time with the public, but this is not enough. We need much more public engagement if we are to raise the awareness and understanding of engineering and its role in society".

I wanted to build on this in the two courses I teach at Imperial College, ME2 Heat Transfer and ME4 Combustion. I also wanted to boost somehow students' motivation. So I organized Creative Contests at the beginning of the new academic year. The instructions to participate were the following:

"I have three extra copies of the textbook to give away. If interested, send me a poem, comic, drawing, painting, song, video, or anything creative that explains why you are taking this course. Art, wit and humour are allowed". 

And I gave them one week to submit their pieces. I received several submissions and found three winners for each course. Congratulations to the winners, hope you use extensively your new gifted textbooks.

Submissions to the 2013 Fin's Creative Contest in ME2 Heat Transfer:
(first three are the winners. Each received a hardcopy of Incropera's Foundations of Heat Transfer)

by Keon - Heat transfer is not a lie - Click for song . Click for lyrics.

by Hugh  - Amazing Heat Transfer Acrostic

 

By Eifion - Heat Transfer Limericks

By Kathryn- why study heat transfer?

By Robert - Five reasons why I am studying heat
transfer?

Video: http://www.youtube.com/embed/GgiP9GThwtI?rel=0
Video: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxJI_xWmBZkoblM1eU5RY2NYbEE/preview?pli=1 

 Submissions to the 2013 Candle's Creative Contest in ME4 Combustion:
(First three submissions are the winners. Each received a hard copy of McAllister's Fundamentals of Combustion Processes).

By Christian - Combustion, it blows you away!

By Wayne - Little deyas

By Maria - Flames estatue

by William - Combustion

 

Miles sent this photo by McLaren of an P1 exhaust flame

Boris - Hot air balloon in Morocco

Guillaume - First bone fire in human history - synchronistic style

Walaa selected the poem Fire by 'livin the night life'

9/11 World Trade Center Attacks: Engineering Lessons After the Collapse of the Towers

I recently wrote an editorial on the 2001 World Trade Center attacks to introduce an incoming special issue in Fire Technology. It has now been published and can be read here (open access). I reproduce below an excerpt from it.

9/11 World Trade Center Attacks: Lessons in Fire Safety Engineering After the Collapse of the Towers

September, by Gerhard Richter 2005, at MoMA.

"Every engineering discipline has been shaken by tragic events at some point. Ralph W. Emerson (1803–1882) wrote that “We learn geology the morning after the earthquake”. Humans tend to identify gaps of knowledge after a catastrophe. Over time, progress and modern societies have established the means to set up major independent investigations after a technological disaster strikes. Their objective is to unearth the causes and learn lessons from the event so that similar catastrophes are avoided in future. In order for this to happen, it is essential that the results of the investigations are widely disseminated and that the scientific community carefully analyses them, critically assesses them and further improves the conclusions and lessons. This special issue invites the fire safety engineering community to just do that with respect to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York.

WTC towers 1, 2, 5 and 7 collapsed because of the fires triggered by the attacks. From causes to consequences, this disaster touched on a wide range of scientific disciplines. Understanding it thus requires a multidisciplinary approach, and its most important elements are covered in this special issue".

[...]

"This is perhaps best illustrated by an example. In September 2011, 10 years after the attacks, the international magazine Scientific American published an article (“Castles in the Air”) on the WTC disaster’s effect on the design of new tall buildings. It concluded that high rise buildings needed to be kept away from aircrafts and should have means for prompt evacuation; it did not discuss protection from fire. However, WTC 1, 2, 5 and 7 collapsed because of the fires the attacks had triggered—they had resisted the aircraft impacts (WTC 5 and 7 were not even hit) and most of the occupants below the floors of impact were able to safely evacuate".

[...]

--

The full reference is: 

G Rein, 9/11 World Trade Center Attacks: Lessons in Fire Safety Engineering After the Collapse of the Towers, Fire Technology 2013 (in press). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10694-013-0337-6

Likely sequence of events during West Fertilizer explosion, Texas

UPDATE: I have been quoted in Chemistry & Industry 77, May 2013

The cause for the recent incident at the West Fertilizer site in Texas is under investigation and remains unknown, but many parallels can be drawn from previous similar events involving large quantities of inorganic fertilizers.

Aftermath of the mass explosion following a fire in West, Texas, April 17, 2013.
Photo by REUTERS, Mike Stone.

It is the ammonium nitrate (AN) that poses the best known fire and explosion hazards in fertilizer storage sites, especially of the NPK fertilizer type (nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium). Some media outlets are speculating about exploding anhydrous ammonia tanks, but that is a very rare event not ever observed before. Unfortunately, mass fires and explosions in AN warehouse are not uncommon events (average worldwide frequency is about one every three years). One example, in 2001 the AN warehouse of a fertilizer plant in Toulouse, France, exploded resulting in 30 people dead and >2000 injured. The blast wave shattered windows up to 3 km away [source: wikipedia].

I am confident the Fire Service was aware that situation was very difficult and probably had a special emergency plan to deal with this particular site. They attended the fire to comply with their duty in the face of extreme danger. Their main priority would be to control the fire so it does not grow to the critical size when an explosion of AN could be triggered. The science behind a mass explosion following a fire in AN plants is still in bare bones, we know so little, and cannot be predicted. So imagine how difficult it is to deal with the emergency.

The source of the hazard is the exothermic decomposition of AN which begins around 200-230 ◦C. It has been suggested that it follows two reaction paths (the second is more exothermic):

NH₄NO₃→ N₂O + 2 H₂O

4 NH₄NO₃→ 3 N₂ +2 NO₂ +8 H₂O

(a) Unreacted NPK fertilizer granules and (b) cross section showing partially reacted sample with 4 phases visible. Photos from Hadden and Rein 2007.

The fire could have been initiated by self-sustaining decomposition (SSD). This is the phenomenon in which the temperature of a bed of AN-fertilizer rises due to spontaneous heat generation until thermal runaway leads to a fire. The flames would have had then spread to other flammable materials in the plant, like supplies, fuel, packaging, offices or vehicles. SSD of fertilizers is promoted by chemical compounds present in NPK and also the accidental contamination with organic materials. It can start at around 100 ◦C, which is a significantly lower temperatures than that required for pure AN decomposition.

A likely sequence of events is that an accidental heat source (e.g. hot work, hot surface, small fire) starts a SSD reaction in a bed on AN-fertilizer which slowly grows and leads to the fire that the Fire Service were battling. At some point, the flames grow faster than expected and rapidly heat very large quantities of AN, which leads to detonation (=explosion and blast caused by the very rapid decomposition of AN inside an enclosure).

A large detonation wave like this one devastates life and structures over a wide area around the point of origin. Moreover, the burning fertilizer becomes airborne with the explosion and lands further away igniting subsequent fires, as seen in the aftermath of this explosion.

---
Most of the information I used is from our 2007 paper:
- R Hadden, G Rein, Small-scale experiments ofself-sustaining decomposition of NPK fertilizer and application to events aboard the Ostedijk in 2007, Journal of Hazardous Materials 186, pp 731–737, 2011. doi:10.1016/j.jhazmat.2010.11.047.