094 - Experiments that changed fire science pt. 5 - Compartment fires at NBS with James Quintiere

WEBVTT

00:00:00.630 --> 00:00:01.409
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Hello, everybody.

00:00:01.409 --> 00:00:03.120
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Welcome to Fire Science Show.

00:00:03.277 --> 00:00:06.907
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>If you follow last week's episode, you know exactly what's about to happen.

00:00:07.296 --> 00:00:16.926
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>I have interviewed professor James Quintiere on the us fire movement and the development of fire science in seventies and eighties in us and collaborations worldwide.

00:00:17.347 --> 00:00:18.727
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>It was quite fun.

00:00:19.086 --> 00:00:21.286
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>albeit the little, a bittersweet.

00:00:21.727 --> 00:00:25.266
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>With, uh, the politics involved and reasons why.

00:00:25.567 --> 00:00:29.106
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>The golden era of fire science has ended actually in there.

00:00:29.370 --> 00:00:34.500
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Anyway today, we're coming back to these glorious times, but with a more technical approach.

00:00:34.859 --> 00:00:43.384
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>So I have interviewed James for another hour for about, uh, technicalities of research carried at NBS or NIST now.

00:00:43.834 --> 00:00:47.764
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>How this experiments were planned, how they choose the topics.

00:00:48.154 --> 00:00:53.433
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Uh, who was involved, how they measured stuff, actually, that's, that's probably the most impressive part of it.

00:00:53.463 --> 00:00:55.054
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>How did they measure stuff?

00:00:55.106 --> 00:01:07.956
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>And while these guys were advanced in measuring stuff in fire, and so much more careful than many of fire researchers, I know myself, including, It's fascinating and inspiring to learn from James about that.

00:01:08.150 --> 00:01:19.159
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>I guess I'll be fine, ending intro as it is now, because I think I need to recommend listening to James Quintiere talking about some of the most impactful fire experiments ever conducted in history.

00:01:19.459 --> 00:01:22.579
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>So, yeah, let's spin the intro and jump i into the episodes.

00:01:45.876 --> 00:01:50.986
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>It's been two months since I've received a professional support from my sponsor, OFR Consultants.

00:01:51.016 --> 00:01:53.025
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>And I must tell you it's really helpful.

00:01:53.403 --> 00:01:57.063
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>And really helps me create the episodes, like the one you're about to hear.

00:01:57.308 --> 00:02:01.959
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>So I would like to express my huge gratitude to all four consultants for being a pattern of the show.

00:02:02.326 --> 00:02:12.293
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>If you had no chance to learn about them yet OFR Consultants is a multi award winning independent consultancy in UK dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges.

00:02:12.532 --> 00:02:25.740
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>It's UKs leading fire risk consultancy, and OFRs globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise with colleagues working across the globe to protect people, property environment.

00:02:26.150 --> 00:02:35.129
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>OFR is always looking to grow its, and it's always keen to hear from industry professionals, who'd like to collaborate with them on fire safety futures this year.

00:02:35.639 --> 00:02:37.770
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>If you're one of such people.

00:02:37.979 --> 00:02:40.379
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Get in touch@overconsultants.com.

00:02:40.680 --> 00:02:46.710
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>And if you're an academic looking up for stipends and scholarships that are being funded at major universities across UK.

00:02:46.752 --> 00:02:47.909
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>You can also reach out to them.

00:02:48.060 --> 00:02:54.729
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>OFR thank you so much for being a patron of this show and helping me create this content free for everyone.

00:02:54.789 --> 00:02:59.328
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>And now back to the experiments that changed fire science with James Quintiere.

00:02:59.842 --> 00:03:00.722
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>hello everybody.

00:03:00.722 --> 00:03:02.762
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Welcome to Fire Science Show.

00:03:03.102 --> 00:03:06.442
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I'm today again with Professor James Quintiere hello, James.

00:03:06.442 --> 00:03:07.322
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Nice to have you here

00:03:07.322 --> 00:03:07.602
<v James Quintiere>again.

00:03:07.855 --> 00:03:08.271
<v James Quintiere>yes.

00:03:08.271 --> 00:03:08.632
<v James Quintiere>Thank you.

00:03:08.632 --> 00:03:09.752
<v James Quintiere>Thank you, Che.

00:03:09.816 --> 00:03:10.329
<v James Quintiere>Really,

00:03:10.329 --> 00:03:13.731
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>really happy that you've, uh, to continue our interview.

00:03:14.122 --> 00:03:30.165
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Last time, we were talking a lot about the history of the US Fire Movement, how many things were put into the place, the politics that did not help that much, and sometimes, uh, made destruction to the efforts of fire scientists.

00:03:30.165 --> 00:03:44.165
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>However, when we're discussing the mid seventies and your early days at there has been a lot of great fire science and experiments, and that's what I would like to cover in this part of the podcast.

00:03:45.135 --> 00:03:55.938
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So, first, like, if you can, tell me, uh, what sorts of experiments were the ones that were most interesting for you happening in seventies, mid seventies, early

00:03:55.938 --> 00:03:56.378
<v James Quintiere>eighties?

00:03:56.989 --> 00:04:04.929
<v James Quintiere>Well, uh, I'm the kind of person that sees the big picture, so I would say almost all of them All of them.

00:04:05.318 --> 00:04:09.359
<v James Quintiere>with, uh, uh, physics instead of chemistry.

00:04:09.408 --> 00:04:15.366
<v James Quintiere>If it, dealt with flame retardants or maybe smoked particles or something like that.

00:04:15.515 --> 00:04:15.675
<v James Quintiere>Hmm.

00:04:15.765 --> 00:04:27.538
<v James Quintiere>didn't attract my attention as much as, flame spray and, the motion of, fluid in fire, pool fires, uh, fires in compartments.

00:04:28.446 --> 00:04:30.875
<v James Quintiere>so all of that kind of attracted.

00:04:31.406 --> 00:04:36.932
<v James Quintiere>and I think I spread my career over working in bits and pieces of territory.

00:04:37.380 --> 00:04:50.201
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Well, uh, I struggle to call them bits and pieces because in your scientific curriculum, there is so many fundamental, papers and, and stuff that's absolutely fundamental to our modern understanding of fire.

00:04:50.211 --> 00:04:53.132
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Calling them bits, uh, is maybe, uh,

00:04:53.172 --> 00:05:07.651
<v James Quintiere>Well, enabled me and en and encouraged me to write a book to put that together and to try to, uh, create the book in terms of the bits and pieces, but to make it unified in a way.

00:05:08.235 --> 00:05:17.255
<v James Quintiere>So the style of my book is more like a book on heat transfer or fluid mechanics, which tried to integrate the subject so that.

00:05:17.593 --> 00:05:29.120
<v James Quintiere>Flame spread is not distinct from a fire plume There's things that are in common and it's becomes part of the same discipline of fire behavior.

00:05:29.521 --> 00:05:50.278
<v James Quintiere>And so fire behavior, I think was the key attract to, to me, and fires and buildings and, uh, the most of the research at that time, either at NIST or in the academic field, and I would say most of it was in the academic field, focused in that territory.

00:05:50.367 --> 00:05:59.437
<v James Quintiere>So they were looking at ignition flame spread, how things burn, what's the real science ingredients of a test method.

00:06:00.105 --> 00:06:01.665
<v James Quintiere>Fires in compartments.

00:06:01.954 --> 00:06:06.185
<v James Quintiere>Um, what happens when a flame hits a wall, when it hits a ceiling?

00:06:06.875 --> 00:06:10.254
<v James Quintiere>why are laminate flames different than turbulent flames?

00:06:10.798 --> 00:06:22.214
<v James Quintiere>So all of that came into a perspective for people to work on because nist assembled three groups in fire into one, Mm-hmm.

00:06:22.267 --> 00:06:28.324
<v James Quintiere>and they brought in the research activity of the National Science Foundation, which was academia.

00:06:28.920 --> 00:06:29.040
<v James Quintiere>Hmm.

00:06:29.211 --> 00:06:35.440
<v James Quintiere>all of that came together and it came together under, the fire directorship of John Lyons.

00:06:36.021 --> 00:06:39.300
<v James Quintiere>and people started thinking about all those bits and pieces.

00:06:40.065 --> 00:06:45.600
<v James Quintiere>there were bits and pieces and the integration of them, was not considered.

00:06:45.730 --> 00:06:49.399
<v James Quintiere>It was just, let's look at each individual piece.

00:06:50.180 --> 00:06:58.279
<v James Quintiere>And when you look at pieces, what people do first is Let's burn something let's try to figure out what's going on.

00:06:58.665 --> 00:07:05.516
<v James Quintiere>and so that was the really, the approach that people made those, uh, 1970s

00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:13.060
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>And, and I assume then you suddenly realize this, all these things intertwined together, one leads to another.

00:07:13.060 --> 00:07:18.064
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>You cannot consider flashover without understanding the, ignition of, of a solid

00:07:18.064 --> 00:07:18.745
<v James Quintiere>surface, right?

00:07:19.019 --> 00:07:19.300
<v James Quintiere>yes.

00:07:19.449 --> 00:07:22.620
<v James Quintiere>I mean, you need to understand buoyancy.

00:07:22.639 --> 00:07:30.435
<v James Quintiere>You need to understand heat transfer, flute mechanics, and then you, you need to understand how combustion comes into play in that.

00:07:30.630 --> 00:07:34.350
<v James Quintiere>and one person we haven't mentioned is Brian Spalding.

00:07:34.821 --> 00:07:43.130
<v James Quintiere>Brian Spalding in his early work, tried to look at combustion problems, in an engineering framework.

00:07:43.413 --> 00:07:49.644
<v James Quintiere>In his later years, he moved to C F D because he felt that there was limitations, rightly so.

00:07:50.235 --> 00:07:57.805
<v James Quintiere>you know, you've probably heard of the B number and the formulation of how things burn in terms of number Hmm.

00:07:58.574 --> 00:08:07.408
<v James Quintiere>Schwab, Zeldovitch,  in how you can make the equations of mass and heat transfer, assemble into one.

00:08:07.985 --> 00:08:15.995
<v James Quintiere>And so that foundation was there from Spalding and Zel that allowed fire scientists to tap into.

00:08:16.404 --> 00:08:19.675
<v James Quintiere>So that was an analytical tool that they could use.

00:08:19.735 --> 00:08:29.105
<v James Quintiere>But really to look at this for the first time that many people were just stepping into it, they, they had to figure out what to look at, how to look at it.

00:08:29.555 --> 00:08:45.451
<v James Quintiere>Uh, I could remember early scientists making measurements of temperature or velocity, and they were incorrect because they didn't understand that a thermocouple could have errors or that you were measuring velocity so low that, know, their instrument wasn't capable.

00:08:46.451 --> 00:08:48.650
<v James Quintiere>there were a lot of challenges like, like that.

00:08:49.301 --> 00:08:54.118
<v James Quintiere>and, bringing all of that together at N B S a catalyst.

00:08:54.610 --> 00:09:02.057
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>you've mentioned analytical tools that existed, What was the state of computational fire science at that point?

00:09:02.057 --> 00:09:06.884
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Was it already the times where Howard Emmons had this first, code produced?

00:09:07.399 --> 00:09:07.750
<v James Quintiere>No,

00:09:07.934 --> 00:09:08.284
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>No.

00:09:08.600 --> 00:09:08.950
<v James Quintiere>no.

00:09:08.950 --> 00:09:22.330
<v James Quintiere>The Howard Emmonds code grew out of the work, the early work in the seventies, in which, like even Howard Emmonds himself, he, he would have students, he had one student before all of this came together.

00:09:22.399 --> 00:09:24.815
<v James Quintiere>Look at how Wood Cribs Mm-hmm.

00:09:25.113 --> 00:09:32.613
<v James Quintiere>and expanded the work of Dan Gross Robertson from NBS and brought a theory into play.

00:09:33.546 --> 00:09:35.865
<v James Quintiere>Emmons had John de Ris work on on Flame.

00:09:36.440 --> 00:09:41.039
<v James Quintiere>and get, almost an exact solution for flame spread.

00:09:41.712 --> 00:09:47.520
<v James Quintiere>Emmons worked uh, a fire whirl which was a phenomena not understood.

00:09:48.389 --> 00:09:53.393
<v James Quintiere>Emmons had, Frank Tamanini work on, um, extinguishment of, fires.

00:09:53.860 --> 00:10:00.023
<v James Quintiere>and then at the same time at FM was work going on on pool fires, uh, Modac.

00:10:00.712 --> 00:10:02.942
<v James Quintiere>So people were focused on all of this.

00:10:02.942 --> 00:10:07.903
<v James Quintiere>And there was an collaboration of the work between FM and Harvard.

00:10:08.692 --> 00:10:10.822
<v James Quintiere>That program was linked.

00:10:10.832 --> 00:10:17.023
<v James Quintiere>It was funded in as a link from NBS it wasn't funded to Harvard and to fm.

00:10:17.192 --> 00:10:17.942
<v James Quintiere>It was funded.

00:10:18.717 --> 00:10:22.868
<v James Quintiere>To Harvard and FM as a single entity.

00:10:23.727 --> 00:10:29.868
<v James Quintiere>And because they had all these pieces, they decided they should put it together in a compartment fire.

00:10:30.258 --> 00:10:39.990
<v James Quintiere>Okay, they, had a whole series of compartment fires with the best instrumentation unravel what was going on in the different pieces.

00:10:40.764 --> 00:10:45.384
<v James Quintiere>And that led to Emmons, concept of a zone model.

00:10:45.855 --> 00:10:46.654
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>fantastic.

00:10:46.654 --> 00:10:51.077
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>And, and what was the understanding of the smoke dynamics at that point?

00:10:51.498 --> 00:10:54.398
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>The, the fire plumes, entrainment the

00:10:54.628 --> 00:10:55.238
<v James Quintiere>layers.

00:10:55.554 --> 00:11:06.734
<v James Quintiere>first of all, I think the smoke layer and the idea that you would have such a stratified Hmm atmosphere was something that was a revelation had to be probed.

00:11:06.947 --> 00:11:07.107
<v James Quintiere>hmm.

00:11:07.326 --> 00:11:12.820
<v James Quintiere>but because there was this focus on fire, many people recognized it.

00:11:13.149 --> 00:11:18.625
<v James Quintiere>So Tanaka in Japan recognized it, and he could make his own model.

00:11:19.475 --> 00:11:30.216
<v James Quintiere>Uh, people at, Illinois Institute of Technology, they got a grant from the National Science Foundation, and they could conceive of this, Emmons could conceive of it.

00:11:30.365 --> 00:11:36.405
<v James Quintiere>I, I could do my little experiments in a compartment start to see this, Hmm.

00:11:36.456 --> 00:11:46.135
<v James Quintiere>so I could form the basis of a system model that said, you have an upper layer, you have a lower layer, and you have flow through an opening.

00:11:46.846 --> 00:11:55.176
<v James Quintiere>Let's conceive of the model in those terms, and now let's proceed to figure out how you get the flow in and out.

00:11:55.778 --> 00:11:59.615
<v James Quintiere>what is the fire plume doing and build from there.

00:11:59.975 --> 00:12:09.681
<v James Quintiere>And so this idea of a zone model came  in several places because of the dynamic and interaction I think of the work.

00:12:09.947 --> 00:12:30.998
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>if you look the zones, the, i I think the distinguishment between the, the hot smoke zone and, and the free zone, you can observe that, you know, but wh when did you realize that the assumption that the, the hot zone can be considered as something, uh, unified, like, uh, How did you probe that?

00:12:30.998 --> 00:12:31.398
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>How did you

00:12:31.638 --> 00:12:31.998
<v James Quintiere>validate that?

00:12:32.134 --> 00:12:39.664
<v James Quintiere>well, in the work with Steckler, used aspirated thermocouple probes, which were first used I think at fm.

00:12:39.884 --> 00:12:40.495
<v James Quintiere>Mm-hmm.

00:12:40.835 --> 00:12:43.465
<v James Quintiere>to try to eliminate radiation effects.

00:12:43.754 --> 00:12:56.341
<v James Quintiere>At the same time, work was going on, at, Caltech, under Ed Zukowski, and he would measure very carefully that temperature profile, in, uh, a room fire.

00:12:56.841 --> 00:13:02.090
<v James Quintiere>And he would measure the gas profile and he would show, uh, how uniform, Hmm.

00:13:02.404 --> 00:13:02.725
<v James Quintiere>was.

00:13:03.725 --> 00:13:11.684
<v James Quintiere>of course, if you have a large room, like a corridor, like room, then it's going to vary as you move away from the fire.

00:13:12.644 --> 00:13:15.965
<v James Quintiere>as a first approximation, the, that's what you have.

00:13:16.065 --> 00:13:25.565
<v James Quintiere>And in that sense, Howard Emms was the last thing he was trying to work on was how to extend a room to a corridor like, enclosure.

00:13:26.559 --> 00:13:34.840
<v James Quintiere>So you could allow for the, in the zone model, the variation in temperature longitudinally along the corridor.

00:13:35.570 --> 00:13:49.860
<v James Quintiere>So there was, there was work trying to extend that, but there's really no need to do that when you realize that Tanaka applied his zone model to the World Trade Center after the bombing.

00:13:50.046 --> 00:13:56.221
<v James Quintiere>And he modeled the smoke movement in the entire World Trade Center Hmm, with his own, with his own model.

00:13:56.448 --> 00:13:59.068
<v James Quintiere>and Tanaka has built in wind effects.

00:13:59.698 --> 00:14:06.764
<v James Quintiere>He's built in mixing effects between the layers that Ed Zukowski illuminated really.

00:14:07.188 --> 00:14:07.428
<v James Quintiere>research.

00:14:07.769 --> 00:14:12.458
<v James Quintiere>so the zone model concept came out of that, catalyst of interaction.

00:14:13.057 --> 00:14:24.051
<v James Quintiere>and people watching, you know, like you said, you could see it,  And so, it's like from an engineering point of view, Hey, let's model this as one zone and another zone.

00:14:24.551 --> 00:14:29.464
<v James Quintiere>And they interact, they interact through the plume and they interact, through mixing.

00:14:29.964 --> 00:14:38.841
<v James Quintiere>And they also interact because, when the lower wall gets hot, heat goes, the hot gases move up along that wall, Hmm.

00:14:39.000 --> 00:14:41.301
<v James Quintiere>and then they encounter a hotter layer.

00:14:41.759 --> 00:14:47.650
<v James Quintiere>So now they can't penetrate and they blur out the zone between the hot and cold layer.

00:14:48.030 --> 00:14:51.051
<v James Quintiere>And there was research going on on that.

00:14:51.740 --> 00:14:56.490
<v James Quintiere>So those things could be embedded into a zone model as secondary.

00:14:57.740 --> 00:14:58.100
<v James Quintiere>Phenomenal.

00:14:58.470 --> 00:15:01.878
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>just like plume model is, is is also embedded as

00:15:02.557 --> 00:15:02.758
<v James Quintiere>embedded.

00:15:03.214 --> 00:15:11.030
<v James Quintiere>but of course when you embedded, you don't have the effect of coming in from one side knocking the plume mm-hmm.

00:15:11.390 --> 00:15:13.821
<v James Quintiere>in the zone model, the plume stands up straight.

00:15:14.106 --> 00:15:21.177
<v James Quintiere>But in a CF D model, the plume will bend over because it will, yield to that fluid of mechanics.

00:15:21.500 --> 00:15:26.990
<v James Quintiere>and might do the mixing too, but it might not because that's a viscous, turbulent effect.

00:15:27.395 --> 00:15:34.625
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So when designing experiments, to see inside the layers, what kind of tools you had available?

00:15:34.686 --> 00:15:37.572
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>You said, aspirating, thermal, uh, couples.

00:15:37.572 --> 00:15:39.613
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>That's, that, that I guess is quite advanced.

00:15:39.828 --> 00:15:43.938
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Uh, what, what was your options for, for example, measuring heat fluxes?

00:15:43.938 --> 00:15:46.859
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>You, you had water called gouges at

00:15:46.859 --> 00:15:47.219
<v James Quintiere>that point.

00:15:47.683 --> 00:15:48.193
<v James Quintiere>Y Yes.

00:15:48.530 --> 00:15:59.974
<v James Quintiere>there were these companies like Mether, Hmm whose founder actually had a PhD from who developed, thermopile type heat flux sensors.

00:15:59.974 --> 00:16:03.339
<v James Quintiere>There's also a gourdon guide type hmm.

00:16:04.244 --> 00:16:11.850
<v James Quintiere>a guard type heat flex sensor is a, a thin piece of metal in which you measure the center and the edge.

00:16:12.230 --> 00:16:16.010
<v James Quintiere>And that difference corresponds to the heat flux that's received.

00:16:16.857 --> 00:16:28.980
<v James Quintiere>thermo pile actually acts like a, it is a thin layer, but it has, the ability to measure temperature difference across that thin layer and from the conduction through it.

00:16:29.480 --> 00:16:34.908
<v James Quintiere>uh, you can get the heat flux and the thermo pile one is far superior.

00:16:34.927 --> 00:16:38.110
<v James Quintiere>The guard on gauge has some, uh, problems with it.

00:16:38.201 --> 00:16:43.467
<v James Quintiere>So, people would use these and there would be issues of, Jorge, it's water cooled.

00:16:43.467 --> 00:16:45.748
<v James Quintiere>You're putting it in a wall that's hot.

00:16:46.100 --> 00:16:52.160
<v James Quintiere>Now you have a flow coming along and it sees this cold thing, and then suddenly it sees a hot thing again.

00:16:52.860 --> 00:16:57.921
<v James Quintiere>And so there's issues of heat transfer, fluid mechanics of how to really interpret that gauge.

00:16:58.160 --> 00:16:58.770
<v James Quintiere>mm-hmm.

00:16:58.783 --> 00:17:00.823
<v James Quintiere>People were struggling with that.

00:17:00.933 --> 00:17:02.624
<v James Quintiere>I think people forgot that today,

00:17:03.009 --> 00:17:08.395
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>And, uh, devices like we used today, like plate thermometers or thin skin color meters.

00:17:08.395 --> 00:17:10.036
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>They, they were not available.

00:17:10.540 --> 00:17:12.398
<v James Quintiere>thermometer is Thermo couple.

00:17:12.398 --> 00:17:12.558
<v James Quintiere>Yeah.

00:17:13.094 --> 00:17:13.773
<v James Quintiere>type gauge.

00:17:14.773 --> 00:17:15.854
<v James Quintiere>not the guard on gauge.

00:17:15.854 --> 00:17:17.814
<v James Quintiere>It's actually measuring it.

00:17:17.814 --> 00:17:20.726
<v James Quintiere>It's, you know, Wickstrom, promoted this thing.

00:17:20.962 --> 00:17:25.583
<v James Quintiere>but it, it's been there for a long time and it can give you, uh, results.

00:17:26.073 --> 00:17:29.353
<v James Quintiere>and so I, I've used that on occasion too.

00:17:29.873 --> 00:17:35.229
<v James Quintiere>but to me, I think the, the, uh, thermo pile gauge is probably the best.

00:17:35.425 --> 00:17:46.182
<v James Quintiere>The issues with those gauges is that need to make sure you know, the emissivity of the surface and the surface doesn't get cor fouled up during your experiment.

00:17:46.451 --> 00:17:51.722
<v James Quintiere>In addition, if you try to separate out radiation, you put a window over it Mm-hmm.

00:17:52.022 --> 00:17:57.002
<v James Quintiere>and the window is now transparent, but not completely to radiation.

00:17:57.792 --> 00:17:59.063
<v James Quintiere>So you have that issue.

00:17:59.459 --> 00:18:05.898
<v James Quintiere>you try to blow air over the window to keep soot from coming in, but it deposits anyway.

00:18:06.644 --> 00:18:10.361
<v James Quintiere>So there are still issues with those, gauges.

00:18:11.560 --> 00:18:25.163
<v James Quintiere>very fundamental issue that I don't think has been resolved, and maybe ISOs tried to do this, but I don't think they succeeded, to figure out how, how to find a way to calibrate these gauges.

00:18:25.596 --> 00:18:27.541
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>we, we still think about that, you know,

00:18:28.351 --> 00:18:32.371
<v James Quintiere>You think about it and you don't have a way to do it.

00:18:33.070 --> 00:18:36.651
<v James Quintiere>And when I was at NIST there are ways to do it.

00:18:36.651 --> 00:18:38.530
<v James Quintiere>There's, there's improved techniques.

00:18:38.530 --> 00:18:48.077
<v James Quintiere>There's a, device called a ellipsoidal, radiometer that has uh, gold surfaces in an ellipse.

00:18:48.577 --> 00:18:51.540
<v James Quintiere>And you one focal point of the ellipse where the.

00:18:52.270 --> 00:18:56.010
<v James Quintiere>the stuff enters and the other fo focal point, you have a sensor.

00:18:56.522 --> 00:18:56.682
<v James Quintiere>Hmm.

00:18:57.008 --> 00:19:04.661
<v James Quintiere>and the gold allows you to capture everything that comes in, uh, between the two focal points and you blow air through this thing.

00:19:04.711 --> 00:19:07.080
<v James Quintiere>So you're always, blowing the smoke away.

00:19:07.611 --> 00:19:10.760
<v James Quintiere>So you will always get the radiation that comes in.

00:19:11.141 --> 00:19:13.468
<v James Quintiere>And that's an expensive, tool.

00:19:13.673 --> 00:19:23.983
<v James Quintiere>If you go to Med Tham these days, the current guy that's operating that, he, he also has a PhD from M I t and I think he has a good understanding of these gauges.

00:19:24.651 --> 00:19:29.621
<v James Quintiere>don't tell you how they calibrate them, but they probably have a black body someplace.

00:19:29.641 --> 00:19:36.104
<v James Quintiere>And in my days at NIST in the seventies, I went to the people who did.

00:19:36.198 --> 00:19:42.008
<v James Quintiere>radiometry measurements for light and things like that at mbs.

00:19:42.258 --> 00:20:00.840
<v James Quintiere>So they were very accomplished and understood, uh, spectral aspects and emmis civilities, and they calibrated, uh, thermo pile gauge for me that I bought for mether, and they calibrated it up to, I think, I don't know, maybe two, kilowatts per meter squared.

00:20:00.840 --> 00:20:15.881
<v James Quintiere>They couldn't go beyond, they couldn't go beyond the certain, so they, they, they calibrated two of these for me, and then I inherited a, a light source that gave me ability to get to a hundred kilowatts per meter squared.

00:20:16.006 --> 00:20:22.903
<v James Quintiere>And so as, as long as I had a paint on this sensor, That was an emmis of one, Mm-hmm.

00:20:23.013 --> 00:20:28.013
<v James Quintiere>did, I I, there was a special paint that gave you an emissivity of like 0.98.

00:20:28.173 --> 00:20:28.784
<v James Quintiere>Mm-hmm.

00:20:29.324 --> 00:20:38.657
<v James Quintiere>I had these two things calibrated, and although they were calibrated at a low heat flux, we could show that the thermo pile gauge works in a linear way.

00:20:39.448 --> 00:20:39.728
<v James Quintiere>Interesting.

00:20:39.728 --> 00:20:40.048
<v James Quintiere>Yeah.

00:20:40.208 --> 00:20:48.137
<v James Quintiere>So if, if you go to higher heat flux, it's linear here, and you, you could show that, scientifically, uh, from the theory of that gauge.

00:20:48.550 --> 00:20:53.493
<v James Quintiere>so we developed, this technique and it stays at NIST to this day.

00:20:53.784 --> 00:20:59.901
<v James Quintiere>However, after I left nist, they lost one of the sensors and, they used the sensor.

00:21:00.678 --> 00:21:05.432
<v James Quintiere>To give to anyone in the cone that wants to calibrate their cone.

00:21:05.647 --> 00:21:12.181
<v James Quintiere>And so this sensor that is supposed to be in a lockbox is distributed to people to use.

00:21:12.682 --> 00:21:18.903
<v James Quintiere>Now, when you, when you have a calibration source, you've developed transfer standards.

00:21:19.458 --> 00:21:21.087
<v James Quintiere>So people haven't done that.

00:21:21.433 --> 00:21:26.653
<v James Quintiere>the FAA, I've done work here, uh, I'm in New Jersey right now.

00:21:27.104 --> 00:21:44.594
<v James Quintiere>they went to med and they got assurances that they would get the right so in recent years, I took the sensor I had, which came from nist, you know, traceable to NIST and That was traceable to mem.

00:21:45.574 --> 00:21:47.013
<v James Quintiere>they were within 5%.

00:21:47.943 --> 00:21:51.814
<v James Quintiere>So that's the kind of confidence level I have today in those sensors.

00:21:52.814 --> 00:21:56.653
<v James Quintiere>I do think that a lot of people should pay attention to how they calibrate them.

00:21:56.917 --> 00:21:58.107
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>uh, that's astonishing.

00:21:58.107 --> 00:22:03.691
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Like, uh, it, it seems you may even, like, you definitely had a higher comprehension of,

00:22:03.861 --> 00:22:07.993
<v James Quintiere>of this, well, we worried about stuff like that in those days.

00:22:07.993 --> 00:22:12.114
<v James Quintiere>Like Bernie McCaffrey wondered what's the best way to measure

00:22:12.743 --> 00:22:14.521
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>that, that was my next question, like,

00:22:14.594 --> 00:22:23.718
<v James Quintiere>he, he said I could do it with a Pitot tube I know a pitot tube is, now it, if he did it with a hot wire and put it in a fire plume, Mm-hmm.

00:22:23.857 --> 00:22:25.008
<v James Quintiere>it may not survive.

00:22:25.428 --> 00:22:26.038
<v James Quintiere>Mm-hmm.

00:22:26.048 --> 00:22:33.395
<v James Quintiere>the error that you would get from the so collection or the buoyancy effect on, on the thing There would be problems.

00:22:33.608 --> 00:22:46.470
<v James Quintiere>So went to the pitot tube, but then later on he went to the bidirectional probe, particularly if we looked at doorway flows, because Heskestad developed that.

00:22:46.470 --> 00:22:52.950
<v James Quintiere>And if he wanted to measure a doorway flow, didn't want to take a, have two pito tubes there.

00:22:53.211 --> 00:22:53.701
<v James Quintiere>Yeah.

00:22:53.875 --> 00:23:01.803
<v James Quintiere>made the bidirectional probe, which works on the same principle as the Pito tube, in place of two pito tubes in different directions,

00:23:02.182 --> 00:23:04.796
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So, so to give a better context to listeners.

00:23:04.796 --> 00:23:07.955
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So we are here talking about compartment fire dynamics.

00:23:07.955 --> 00:23:10.155
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>We just said that you had two layers.

00:23:10.155 --> 00:23:13.036
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>We've discussed how temperatures were measured in layers.

00:23:13.296 --> 00:23:19.675
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>The second, next most important thing is the opening at which the exchange of mass between the compartment and exterior happens.

00:23:20.006 --> 00:23:28.912
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So you really need to very precisely quantify the flow in and flow out in both in terms of temperatures and terms of, the volumetric, uh, flows.

00:23:29.182 --> 00:23:31.893
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So, so that's a challenging measurement even today.

00:23:31.893 --> 00:23:37.519
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>And I think, what you are now describing the bidirectional probe is still the, the standard, uh,

00:23:37.880 --> 00:23:38.000
<v James Quintiere>approach.

00:23:38.480 --> 00:23:49.715
<v James Quintiere>it is a way to do it, but at that time period, Hmm, like Bernie McCaffrey said, okay, uh, Heskes that developed this, h how does it work compared to the pido tube?

00:23:50.195 --> 00:23:50.346
<v James Quintiere>hmm.

00:23:50.346 --> 00:23:55.339
<v James Quintiere>what, uh, coefficient do I need for this bidirectional probe?

00:23:56.222 --> 00:24:03.363
<v James Quintiere>how is it affected by the angle of the flow the direction of the velocity if it doesn't hit it straight on?

00:24:03.730 --> 00:24:17.150
<v James Quintiere>And so people were concerned about that because if you put this thing in a doorway flow, you see right away that if flow is coming out, the flow goes down over the soften and then goes back up again.

00:24:18.369 --> 00:24:25.589
<v James Quintiere>you, you have that probe now in a way where the flow is actually changing direction very strongly.

00:24:26.289 --> 00:24:29.779
<v James Quintiere>And so is it measuring the, the flow accurately then?

00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:40.093
<v James Quintiere>And so we looked at all those issues  know, and Ed Zukowski was another guy that took pains to make sure he had the right measurements.

00:24:40.460 --> 00:24:48.730
<v James Quintiere>and so measurement techniques were important and their validity, based on how they're calibrated or how, how they should be interpreted?

00:24:49.025 --> 00:24:52.755
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>were the experiments on the ceiling jets also carried at NIST at that time?

00:24:52.830 --> 00:24:54.901
<v James Quintiere>Oh, the ceiling jet was done.

00:24:55.134 --> 00:25:04.134
<v James Quintiere>it was probably motivated by John gave Ron Alper, uh, his, of baptism into fire by working on the ceiling jet.

00:25:04.691 --> 00:25:09.931
<v James Quintiere>and so Ron, cobbled together, an analysis of a plume to the jet.

00:25:10.397 --> 00:25:14.065
<v James Quintiere>And, there's been, you know, uh, work on it since.

00:25:14.805 --> 00:25:19.335
<v James Quintiere>But, even Spalding said to me one time, he says, the jet will re Lamin rice.

00:25:20.154 --> 00:25:25.075
<v James Quintiere>and so these are still issues that people haven't fully looked, looked at.

00:25:26.045 --> 00:25:41.698
<v James Quintiere>one thing from the ceiling jet work that Ron Albert did is very useful for fire investigators or fire And that is that a kind of a useful, simple rule that comes out of the ceiling.

00:25:41.698 --> 00:25:45.417
<v James Quintiere>Jet is the ceiling jet takes up 10% of the room height.

00:25:45.990 --> 00:25:52.974
<v James Quintiere>So if you don't have a sprinkler or a detector in that region, they're the ceiling of 10%.

00:25:53.375 --> 00:25:54.564
<v James Quintiere>It's not going to work.

00:25:55.028 --> 00:25:55.492
<v James Quintiere>Yeah.

00:25:55.768 --> 00:25:59.012
<v James Quintiere>very useful stuff came out of Ron Oh.

00:25:59.438 --> 00:26:06.417
<v James Quintiere>But if you go to extend that and try to extend it to flame length under a ceiling, there's still work that needs to be done.

00:26:06.923 --> 00:26:08.083
<v James Quintiere>and that work stopped?

00:26:08.496 --> 00:26:09.942
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>how about entrainment?

00:26:10.640 --> 00:26:16.240
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>McCaffrey did experiments on, on fire plumes within an immense amount of different fire plumes.

00:26:16.240 --> 00:26:19.079
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>How, how was, how was entrainment captured

00:26:19.369 --> 00:26:25.400
<v James Quintiere>by you when in from McCaffrey measurements, he measured the distribution in a plume.

00:26:25.670 --> 00:26:26.339
<v James Quintiere>of velocity?

00:26:26.569 --> 00:26:31.450
<v James Quintiere>he, he measured the velocity across the radius Okay.

00:26:31.569 --> 00:26:32.210
<v James Quintiere>different heights.

00:26:33.210 --> 00:26:43.266
<v James Quintiere>if he, if he did that, he got the temperature and velocity over that radius, then he could integrate that and get mass Mm-hmm.

00:26:43.715 --> 00:26:54.529
<v James Quintiere>However, at the edges, he had big, hes so, he did not put a lot of faith in his entrainment interpretation from those measurements.

00:26:54.759 --> 00:26:58.960
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Don't tell me that my whole career is on that, on this equation.

00:26:59.134 --> 00:27:09.530
<v James Quintiere>The entrainment work, the good entrainment work comes from Ed Zukowski and Byler picked it up as a, another student with Emmons.

00:27:10.371 --> 00:27:14.625
<v James Quintiere>Ed Zokowski conceived of this thing that if you have a hood Mm-hmm.

00:27:14.671 --> 00:27:25.184
<v James Quintiere>and you're extracting gases from it, and you put a fire plume below it, the fire plume will go and fill the hood and some will spill over.

00:27:25.460 --> 00:27:26.069
<v James Quintiere>Mm-hmm.

00:27:26.266 --> 00:27:26.756
<v James Quintiere>. Okay.

00:27:26.830 --> 00:27:38.500
<v James Quintiere>Uh, but if you contain that fire plume in the hood and you don't get any spillover, essentially the, the plume is going into that layer.

00:27:38.915 --> 00:27:41.135
<v James Quintiere>And the flow is coming out the top.

00:27:41.796 --> 00:27:53.903
<v James Quintiere>And so if you vary the height of the, the flame, you could get entrainment at different levels in the flame by that, ture type, technique.

00:27:54.435 --> 00:28:01.432
<v James Quintiere>and so Zukowski that showed that, that could be an accurate way of making the measurement.

00:28:01.685 --> 00:28:04.905
<v James Quintiere>And then Byler and other people probably picked it up.

00:28:04.952 --> 00:28:08.563
<v James Quintiere>But the best measurements come from, Zukowski.

00:28:08.807 --> 00:28:09.590
<v James Quintiere>Fantastic.

00:28:09.776 --> 00:28:13.296
<v James Quintiere>I think in zukowski did it at different sizes.

00:28:13.675 --> 00:28:14.175
<v James Quintiere>All right.

00:28:14.500 --> 00:28:17.724
<v James Quintiere>some people do it for a point source, Mm-hmm.

00:28:18.289 --> 00:28:20.130
<v James Quintiere>can't work for a point source.

00:28:20.130 --> 00:28:28.002
<v James Quintiere>You have to, get some measurements and then extrapolate it to a virtual origin and do things like that.

00:28:28.423 --> 00:28:32.762
<v James Quintiere>But Zukowski measurements of different sizes.

00:28:33.289 --> 00:28:42.202
<v James Quintiere>And again, if you try to take in the effective size, you can get an equation that covers most of the data.

00:28:42.816 --> 00:28:44.920
<v James Quintiere>And I think it's in my book someplace.

00:28:45.009 --> 00:28:48.839
<v James Quintiere>We, one of my students helped, integrate all of that data.

00:28:49.715 --> 00:28:54.670
<v James Quintiere>but, there still needs to be work done there because, you have a big pool fire.

00:28:55.710 --> 00:28:56.480
<v James Quintiere>A big pool.

00:28:56.480 --> 00:28:59.160
<v James Quintiere>Fire is basically laminar at the base.

00:28:59.980 --> 00:29:05.460
<v James Quintiere>So its entrainment is totally different than after you get beyond that region.

00:29:06.400 --> 00:29:14.586
<v James Quintiere>Now is, if FDS is, giving you the answer to all of that, is it good in that lamina range as well as in the turbulent range?

00:29:14.935 --> 00:29:15.506
<v James Quintiere>I don't know.

00:29:16.250 --> 00:29:16.371
<v James Quintiere>Hmm.

00:29:16.465 --> 00:29:27.736
<v James Quintiere>So those problems still are out there  And because you people use C f D, think they got it all already when, they may not.

00:29:28.042 --> 00:29:28.765
<v James Quintiere>That's the.

00:29:28.859 --> 00:29:35.492
<v James Quintiere>before CF d you, you would focus on the experiment and you say, look, what's happening down there at the bottom?

00:29:35.492 --> 00:29:39.813
<v James Quintiere>That's laminar, but I'm analyzing this as a turbulent plume.

00:29:40.259 --> 00:29:43.519
<v James Quintiere>How can my my answer be right down at the bottom?

00:29:43.913 --> 00:29:45.695
<v James Quintiere>and so that's, swept away.

00:29:45.695 --> 00:29:45.976
<v James Quintiere>Now,

00:29:46.272 --> 00:29:47.123
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Very, very

00:29:47.363 --> 00:29:47.643
<v James Quintiere>interesting.

00:29:47.782 --> 00:29:53.022
<v James Quintiere>You CF d prevents us from looking there because we say, look, we, we got it down there.

00:29:53.192 --> 00:29:54.222
<v James Quintiere>It looks laminate.

00:29:54.789 --> 00:29:59.650
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>the lack of, um, of full scale research, uh, is, is

00:29:59.759 --> 00:30:00.319
<v James Quintiere>full scale.

00:30:00.319 --> 00:30:02.319
<v James Quintiere>You could do work on a, okay.

00:30:02.440 --> 00:30:06.836
<v James Quintiere>spread on a napkin and, and still not fully understand it

00:30:06.952 --> 00:30:08.258
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>That's, a challenging,

00:30:08.258 --> 00:30:08.736
<v James Quintiere>well.

00:30:08.736 --> 00:30:11.563
<v James Quintiere>Well, I mean, you go to the work of flame spread, right?

00:30:11.952 --> 00:30:12.015
<v James Quintiere>hmm.

00:30:12.015 --> 00:30:18.373
<v James Quintiere>Concurrent flame spread is still complicated because it involves turbulent and radiation from that.

00:30:18.865 --> 00:30:27.625
<v James Quintiere>but a post flow flame spread is more simple because it's a very kind of stable laminate flame moving, moving along.

00:30:28.615 --> 00:30:43.903
<v James Quintiere>Fernandez when you, hopefully you'll interview him and he could give you the history of that and how they, they had to include, oxygen effects and velocity effects at the leading edge, in terms of a Damkohler number.

00:30:43.972 --> 00:30:44.583
<v James Quintiere>Mm-hmm.

00:30:44.663 --> 00:30:49.049
<v James Quintiere>And, and, and so w work like that was going on, but then it stopped.

00:30:49.461 --> 00:30:50.222
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>We got safety.

00:30:50.232 --> 00:30:51.143
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>We got everything

00:30:51.143 --> 00:30:51.326
<v James Quintiere>now.

00:30:51.506 --> 00:30:57.460
<v James Quintiere>I, I don't know, but you know, upward flame spread is still, upward burning.

00:30:57.710 --> 00:30:58.319
<v James Quintiere>Mm-hmm.

00:30:58.500 --> 00:31:00.420
<v James Quintiere>people I saw that did upward burning.

00:31:00.920 --> 00:31:21.567
<v James Quintiere>To match experiments done at FM Global and by Jerry Faith are the using the, fire foam code from, uh, FM Global, uh, uh, Ning Ren and, ye I mean they produce good results, but they had to get that turbulent boundary layer working, Hmm.

00:31:21.613 --> 00:31:25.153
<v James Quintiere>and I'm still not sure how NIST handles that.

00:31:25.744 --> 00:31:33.125
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Now to go back to the experimental design, I think at some point of the interview you've, uh, you've referred to them as box buildings.

00:31:33.255 --> 00:31:36.837
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Uh, so, uh, how you constructing them.

00:31:36.837 --> 00:31:46.357
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>How are you choosing like the configurations to, to go where you're starting with a very simple configuration of a compartment corridor mixing them.

00:31:46.387 --> 00:31:48.157
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>What was the logic behind that?

00:31:48.223 --> 00:31:52.336
<v James Quintiere>Well, it, again, these things were motivated by c certain things.

00:31:52.772 --> 00:32:02.153
<v James Quintiere>when I got my feet wet in fire nist, it was looking at these corridor fires involving floor covering Mm-hmm.

00:32:02.182 --> 00:32:02.903
<v James Quintiere>a room in the

00:32:03.623 --> 00:32:07.365
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>you said that was an effect of a fire that happened and, and, blocked people.

00:32:07.736 --> 00:32:11.786
<v James Quintiere>Yes, there was a fire in a, nursing home in Pennsylvania.

00:32:12.605 --> 00:32:22.220
<v James Quintiere>And source of funding at that time was, the housing department in the US government, and they gave a lot of money to NIST to study those fires.

00:32:22.519 --> 00:32:30.712
<v James Quintiere>So where one side of, uh, NIST and FIRE had money, directly through nist, which would be almost full funding.

00:32:31.452 --> 00:32:36.353
<v James Quintiere>The other side of the NFI program needed to rely on projects like that.

00:32:36.952 --> 00:32:42.833
<v James Quintiere>And they were able to get some really big, long-term projects, to look at, things like that.

00:32:42.843 --> 00:32:45.472
<v James Quintiere>So both sides motivated each other.

00:32:45.773 --> 00:32:52.472
<v James Quintiere>You know, you could see these big fires going on and other people are saying, oh, wow, I never saw that before.

00:32:52.627 --> 00:32:53.238
<v James Quintiere>Mm-hmm.

00:32:53.542 --> 00:32:59.000
<v James Quintiere>So we, we were in a learning mode, And we had a lot of stimulation.

00:32:59.691 --> 00:33:08.221
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>when, um, looking at, uh, that research, correct me if I'm wrong, but I I've, I didn't see any research on vehicle fires.

00:33:08.221 --> 00:33:08.461
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I

00:33:09.361 --> 00:33:10.050
<v James Quintiere>what kind

00:33:10.111 --> 00:33:13.008
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>vehicle fires Like cars in garage.

00:33:13.678 --> 00:33:14.167
<v James Quintiere>Yeah.

00:33:14.242 --> 00:33:14.701
<v James Quintiere>Uh, yes.

00:33:14.701 --> 00:33:20.788
<v James Quintiere>There weren't yes, because at that time the focus was flashover fire tests.

00:33:20.968 --> 00:33:24.468
<v James Quintiere>How are they doing a good job with materials?

00:33:25.468 --> 00:33:26.708
<v James Quintiere>they causing flashover?

00:33:27.198 --> 00:33:28.983
<v James Quintiere>So the, focus was room fires.

00:33:29.067 --> 00:33:40.662
<v James Quintiere>the, fires in cars only became like, an anecdote when they discovered that the statistics on people dying in car fires, was, off by a factor of 10.

00:33:41.154 --> 00:33:48.884
<v James Quintiere>And so immediately the, Death rate in fire in the US went from 8,000, a year, to 4,000

00:33:48.998 --> 00:33:51.468
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>by correcting By by, by correcting the, the vehicle.

00:33:51.468 --> 00:33:51.883
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Okay.

00:33:52.258 --> 00:33:52.678
<v James Quintiere>Yes.

00:33:52.938 --> 00:33:57.748
<v James Quintiere>And, fires in motor vehicle to give you perspective is 40,000 Mm-hmm.

00:33:57.981 --> 00:34:03.654
<v James Quintiere>and today the, I think the number might be 4,000 for fire in the US today.

00:34:04.347 --> 00:34:06.612
<v James Quintiere>So no one worries about fire anymore.

00:34:06.679 --> 00:34:10.373
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Well, I, I think now with the electric vehicles, it became a trendy topic again,

00:34:10.588 --> 00:34:17.135
<v James Quintiere>Well, yes, but they'll solve that problem because look, using gasoline in vehicles for over

00:34:17.960 --> 00:34:19.639
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>which is kind of flammable

00:34:20.114 --> 00:34:20.534
<v James Quintiere>Yes.

00:34:20.534 --> 00:34:24.414
<v James Quintiere>More worse than the batteries always.

00:34:24.699 --> 00:34:25.693
<v James Quintiere>They're flammable.

00:34:25.952 --> 00:34:35.992
<v James Quintiere>The batteries are only going to be a problem if they're, they have a fatal flaw Hmm when they were made or if there's an accident.

00:34:36.202 --> 00:34:43.612
<v James Quintiere>And the reason is, if you have one go bad, they'll all go bad because the batteries only this big.

00:34:44.105 --> 00:34:47.099
<v James Quintiere>it's like a a, double A battery Yeah.

00:34:47.210 --> 00:34:49.550
<v James Quintiere>has thousands of these things in their cars.

00:34:50.000 --> 00:34:50.420
<v James Quintiere>And.

00:34:50.480 --> 00:34:53.800
<v James Quintiere>so so they'll figure out a way to prevent it.

00:34:53.956 --> 00:35:02.396
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Y your research, this era of research at, at NIST also coincided with, uh, increased use of plastics.

00:35:02.746 --> 00:35:03.166
<v James Quintiere>Yes.

00:35:03.300 --> 00:35:09.766
<v James Quintiere>that's why the fire service started to say, Hey, we're seeing fires occur a lot faster.

00:35:09.856 --> 00:35:11.246
<v James Quintiere>We can't get there fast.

00:35:11.956 --> 00:35:13.876
<v James Quintiere>and somehow they're growing faster.

00:35:14.302 --> 00:35:20.842
<v James Quintiere>And so people started to say plastics and people started to say test methods.

00:35:21.536 --> 00:35:32.036
<v James Quintiere>So the focus of this early science research on fires developing fast in a room flashover,  how do test methods behave?

00:35:32.527 --> 00:35:42.646
<v James Quintiere>So a lot of the research was focused on how does the, uh, so-called tunnel test in the US with fire down a, a tunnel like thing with a fire on a ceiling.

00:35:43.072 --> 00:35:44.713
<v James Quintiere>how is that really working?

00:35:45.317 --> 00:35:49.260
<v James Quintiere>how does, um, the cup burner work, Hmm.

00:35:49.492 --> 00:35:52.233
<v James Quintiere>how does Fire on a Rod work?

00:35:52.436 --> 00:35:57.813
<v James Quintiere>How does the, uh, test for you know, upward spread Hmm.

00:35:58.003 --> 00:35:59.643
<v James Quintiere>a little material work.

00:35:59.822 --> 00:36:02.340
<v James Quintiere>So there was focus on those things too.

00:36:02.800 --> 00:36:05.340
<v James Quintiere>And that's what prompted work on flame spread.

00:36:05.500 --> 00:36:15.282
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>but you were trying to incorporate that, uh, with the, the full compartment size test, like the time to flash over the spread on a, on a carpet.

00:36:15.411 --> 00:36:22.161
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So, so it was not just the material properties, it was, uh, a full scale physics of the whole compartment

00:36:22.161 --> 00:36:23.001
<v James Quintiere>at fire, right?

00:36:23.313 --> 00:36:29.483
<v James Quintiere>I think the focus on room fires, yes, flashover was a motivator in what that was.

00:36:30.067 --> 00:36:35.286
<v James Quintiere>But when people started, modeling the fire, they didn't think they could.

00:36:35.936 --> 00:36:41.036
<v James Quintiere>Put in all the aspects of fire spread do that correctly.

00:36:41.067 --> 00:36:44.434
<v James Quintiere>They were still looked at independently, Mm-hmm.

00:36:44.769 --> 00:36:49.583
<v James Quintiere>some people use FDS to model fire spread in a building today.

00:36:49.813 --> 00:36:50.782
<v James Quintiere>I mean, you can do that.

00:36:50.782 --> 00:37:03.023
<v James Quintiere>But there's a, there's a group called, there used to be a, a meeting annually, internationally where people came from all different places to show how they, applied fds.

00:37:03.364 --> 00:37:07.163
<v James Quintiere>And I think, uh, Kevin McGrattan would cringe when he saw,

00:37:07.992 --> 00:37:13.643
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Yeah, I, I, I also have very limited belief in modeling fire spread in fds.

00:37:13.643 --> 00:37:18.987
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>There are tricks that you can apply, and simplifications you can make, so it looks realistic

00:37:19.137 --> 00:37:23.177
<v James Quintiere>you you can do it, you can, you can use the code to do that.

00:37:24.041 --> 00:37:26.802
<v James Quintiere>but the question is, are you getting the right answer?

00:37:27.177 --> 00:37:27.597
<v James Quintiere>in the.

00:37:27.601 --> 00:37:30.434
<v James Quintiere>just, just a turbulent burning wall.

00:37:30.887 --> 00:37:38.114
<v James Quintiere>when I saw fm, do that with their fire foam do that correctly to the data, I was impressed.

00:37:38.565 --> 00:37:42.581
<v James Quintiere>more like that should be, my opinion, should be, done.

00:37:43.012 --> 00:37:43.302
<v James Quintiere>I

00:37:43.932 --> 00:37:45.382
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>completely agree to that,

00:37:45.628 --> 00:37:55.525
<v James Quintiere>you, have worked by Koseki done under Hirano , which are big fires and they show aspects of these big pool fires.

00:37:55.989 --> 00:38:00.224
<v James Quintiere>I challenge the CFD people to reproduce that data.

00:38:00.351 --> 00:38:07.947
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I, I still think even reproducing something as, as simple, if I may, as temperatures in, fire compartments, that's already a challenge.

00:38:07.947 --> 00:38:22.302
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Like, whenever I see a paper that, uh, is a CFD paper and they show me a comparison with experiment, and they show, you know, this perfect, alignment of temperature, uh, between CFD and experiment.

00:38:22.302 --> 00:38:30.663
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I, my first thought is that, that this is either made up or, or, or mistake because it's, it's, it's almost impossible to get this,

00:38:30.820 --> 00:38:31.460
<v James Quintiere>correct.

00:38:31.769 --> 00:38:32.260
<v James Quintiere>Yeah.

00:38:32.485 --> 00:38:35.405
<v James Quintiere>maybe, maybe it's, it's not impossible.

00:38:35.454 --> 00:38:39.769
<v James Quintiere>If you designed the experiment to fit the CFD model, Okay.

00:38:39.769 --> 00:38:40.449
<v James Quintiere>This way is.

00:38:40.885 --> 00:38:48.514
<v James Quintiere>designed the experiment, so based on the strengths of the CFD model, then you, you might get good results.

00:38:48.514 --> 00:38:56.197
<v James Quintiere>I'm not saying CF  I'm saying that there's aspects of it that need to be improved, especially for something like fire.

00:38:56.327 --> 00:39:11.182
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>1 interesting thing about the experiments you've carried at NBS that we're discussing today, today, your experiments, for example, the done, the one done with Steckler about the fires in compartments, but also the, the, corridor compartment experiments.

00:39:12.023 --> 00:39:16.503
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>These are staple validation cases for today's models.

00:39:16.853 --> 00:39:18.943
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Have you, was this your intention?

00:39:18.943 --> 00:39:24.829
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Have you foreseen that 40 years later, people will still refer to those as the, validation

00:39:24.829 --> 00:39:25.070
<v James Quintiere>points.

00:39:25.688 --> 00:39:36.382
<v James Quintiere>No, but I'm, I, I am impressed, with,  there were CFD models before fds, uh, some of them out of Imperial College and uh, the Staler.

00:39:36.646 --> 00:39:44.086
<v James Quintiere>experiments that we did, were basis of, trying to validate those c f D models.

00:39:44.827 --> 00:39:52.463
<v James Quintiere>And as I said, the last time I had a look at this, this with a student, and we used FDS in the first shot.

00:39:52.472 --> 00:39:58.422
<v James Quintiere>We didn't get it, get it right, because we stopped the grid at the doorway Hmm.

00:39:58.567 --> 00:40:05.766
<v James Quintiere>then the students went on further and extended the grid outside the doorway and got some improved results.

00:40:05.797 --> 00:40:09.003
<v James Quintiere>I forget the details of that, but published someplace.

00:40:10.072 --> 00:40:14.782
<v James Quintiere>we didn't think it was going to be the b the basis to validate c f D models.

00:40:15.702 --> 00:40:32.615
<v James Quintiere>It, it was to get a fundamental understanding before that, the only, results that were kind of over a wide range of conditions was done by and Joe Pr which were using water and salt water.

00:40:33.385 --> 00:40:37.775
<v James Quintiere>So they, they were using water in salt water on a smaller scale.

00:40:37.896 --> 00:40:55.596
<v James Quintiere>And we, we wanted to look at the, the large scale system and out of the small scale results, showed that as you changed the Reynolds number or something, uh, you got a different, flow coefficient to make the correction and work right.

00:40:55.831 --> 00:40:56.251
<v James Quintiere>Hmm.

00:40:56.255 --> 00:41:00.925
<v James Quintiere>And so we wanted to see if that would hold up, in more full scale, realistic.

00:41:01.585 --> 00:41:02.675
<v James Quintiere>Flow conditions.

00:41:03.025 --> 00:41:09.574
<v James Quintiere>That was more the motivation to try to, to extend, this work.

00:41:09.855 --> 00:41:12.215
<v James Quintiere>Emmons did it in a nice, cute way.

00:41:13.094 --> 00:41:26.061
<v James Quintiere>wanted to see if we could use, that time, the instrumentation that we were using was uh, pressure transducers that allowed us to measure in that low range accurately.

00:41:27.010 --> 00:41:28.391
<v James Quintiere>And they were expensive.

00:41:29.050 --> 00:41:34.990
<v James Quintiere>And I think it took me three years before I could buy enough of them to use in St

00:41:35.322 --> 00:41:37.887
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>H how many was there like, 10, 20.

00:41:38.208 --> 00:41:39.557
<v James Quintiere>we might have had about 10.

00:41:40.190 --> 00:41:42.451
<v James Quintiere>and then to measure the temperatures, right?

00:41:42.605 --> 00:41:54.137
<v James Quintiere>we used, work that was done at fm, To investigate the accuracy of aspirated thermo couples where you put a thermocouple in a tube and you suck air over it.

00:41:54.827 --> 00:42:03.737
<v James Quintiere>So when the, the air comes into that tube, you're measuring really the air temperature, at a high velocity over the thermocouple.

00:42:04.467 --> 00:42:10.427
<v James Quintiere>if you just put the Therma couple in bear and you have a fire in hot walls, seeing radiation.

00:42:10.806 --> 00:42:13.007
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>how, how deep is the, the thermocouple into the tube?

00:42:13.007 --> 00:42:14.407
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Is it at the beginning of the tube?

00:42:14.407 --> 00:42:15.967
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Is it, uh, deep into,

00:42:16.237 --> 00:42:17.398
<v James Quintiere>a beginning of, beginning

00:42:17.398 --> 00:42:19.668
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>so, so it's just a shielded thermocouple that

00:42:19.668 --> 00:42:21.438
<v James Quintiere>aspirates the, good ther couple.

00:42:21.538 --> 00:42:21.958
<v James Quintiere>Yes.

00:42:22.027 --> 00:42:26.268
<v James Quintiere>I mean, you could make a Therma couple with a lot of baffles on it too, but then the baffles Hmm,

00:42:26.978 --> 00:42:27.467
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>okay.

00:42:27.728 --> 00:42:28.867
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>And re radiates.

00:42:28.867 --> 00:42:29.148
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Okay.

00:42:29.188 --> 00:42:30.829
<v James Quintiere>then radi radiates.

00:42:31.284 --> 00:42:35.434
<v James Quintiere>uh, or you could use, you know, different size wires and I think.

00:42:36.309 --> 00:42:41.909
<v James Quintiere>we tried different techniques and we, we said, oh, this technique is the best.

00:42:41.909 --> 00:42:42.230
<v James Quintiere>Then.

00:42:42.719 --> 00:42:47.110
<v James Quintiere>So when we did those experiments, we tried to do it in the best way possible.

00:42:47.246 --> 00:42:55.503
<v James Quintiere>p tried to align the, bidirectional probes where the flow was going to be horizontal, you know, even though it's Yeah.

00:42:55.532 --> 00:42:55.773
<v James Quintiere>this.

00:42:56.083 --> 00:42:58.655
<v James Quintiere>And so we, we did the best, we could.

00:42:59.096 --> 00:43:02.695
<v James Quintiere>Those experiments were done not on the NIST campus.

00:43:03.326 --> 00:43:12.429
<v James Quintiere>They were done at a site that NIST inherited from a missile defense site with underground missiles.

00:43:13.202 --> 00:43:21.873
<v James Quintiere>And so we got a building, on those grounds where we could do this and leave it set up for the whole time.

00:43:22.644 --> 00:43:25.755
<v James Quintiere>That took some politics too, Hmm.

00:43:26.288 --> 00:43:36.757
<v James Quintiere>in the missile pits later on, they were doing work on, I think Dave Evans was doing work on ceiling jets because it was a very quiet environment underground.

00:43:37.202 --> 00:43:50.440
<v James Quintiere>so we, we had this extra, because not, I could not build a full scale room at nist, and if I went to the place where we had the big laboratory, we couldn't exhaust that easily.

00:43:50.550 --> 00:43:52.625
<v James Quintiere>I mean, so it, it was tricky.

00:43:52.931 --> 00:44:05.291
<v James Quintiere>So we, we got, know, permission to do these fire experiments, clean fires, and we, can move the, uh, fire plume around so we could show the effect of when you put it in there, a door or an narrow.

00:44:06.481 --> 00:44:08.951
<v James Quintiere>or, you know, you would get different results.

00:44:08.951 --> 00:44:13.047
<v James Quintiere>And so it, it was really gratifying work.

00:44:13.315 --> 00:44:15.534
<v James Quintiere>the technician involved in that.

00:44:15.534 --> 00:44:30.661
<v James Quintiere>Bill Rankin, lives in, uh, I think Northern Michigan on Lake His heritage is, from Finland and he became very close to Matt Kokola when Matt Kokola came and spent time with us.

00:44:30.751 --> 00:44:40.721
<v James Quintiere>So in the eighties when I had my group, I invited a lot of people from abroad to come and integrate with our group and, and work.

00:44:40.847 --> 00:44:50.545
<v James Quintiere>And, Matt Kok has with this guy Bill Rankin, and they did experiments of flames on ceilings that have all kinds of shapes.

00:44:50.684 --> 00:44:53.664
<v James Quintiere>You, you maybe use, could see pictures of them.

00:44:54.545 --> 00:44:57.105
<v James Quintiere>Someplace, but they're quite remarkable.

00:44:57.525 --> 00:45:01.864
<v James Quintiere>And again, I don't think anybody has reproduced them by C f D.

00:45:02.195 --> 00:45:02.994
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Beautiful.

00:45:03.438 --> 00:45:16.126
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>one thing I wanted to ask you, given the modern technology we got today, my generation of fire experiment, you know, laser velocity, fantastic.

00:45:16.126 --> 00:45:24.907
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>color, uh, devices, F T I R spectrometers that you can integrate into your, uh, smoke exhausts

00:45:25.188 --> 00:45:34.235
<v James Quintiere>multi wavelength But, iso, when they were looking at F T R R results for toxicity, laboratories couldn't get consistent measurements.

00:45:34.757 --> 00:45:36.998
<v James Quintiere>You know, that No, I didn't know that.

00:45:37.338 --> 00:45:39.057
<v James Quintiere>to the people on a toxicity committee.

00:45:39.425 --> 00:45:43.746
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I, I'm, I'm actually, uh, going to have David per soon into the, the podcast.

00:45:43.746 --> 00:45:45.545
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I'll ask him about that.

00:45:45.813 --> 00:45:51.456
<v James Quintiere>I don't think F D I R was current in David Pursers time, but please say hello to him.

00:45:51.916 --> 00:45:52.846
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I will, I will.

00:45:53.070 --> 00:46:09.170
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>but, but Jim, the, the question is like, if he could like pick one tool of the modern fire science and, and tr try travel it to the eighties, like, uh, what do you think is the coolest thing we, we have now that you struggled with in the past that way Maybe we don't appreciate

00:46:09.269 --> 00:46:12.615
<v James Quintiere>Well, when you mentioned lasers, Yeah.

00:46:13.076 --> 00:46:17.400
<v James Quintiere>there, are, many ways of the combustion.

00:46:17.400 --> 00:46:28.429
<v James Quintiere>People have learned how to measure things in flames, Inside?\ The inside flames, even look at, uh, The temperature at points and things like that.

00:46:28.480 --> 00:46:41.512
<v James Quintiere>So there, there are many type diagnostic techniques that allow you to see things in flames probably people should start applying to fire you,

00:46:41.512 --> 00:46:47.282
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>you, you have mentioned research like, Prahl and Emmons uh, flows through openings.

00:46:47.452 --> 00:46:51.802
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Uh, that, that's actually one of my favorite research pieces from 1975.

00:46:51.802 --> 00:46:52.402
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Amazing.

00:46:52.543 --> 00:46:56.782
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>piece and fundamental piece of research for, for practical, for engineering.

00:46:57.052 --> 00:46:58.943
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Well, yeah.

00:46:59.295 --> 00:47:00.096
<v James Quintiere>saltwater.

00:47:00.416 --> 00:47:17.057
<v James Quintiere>and again, with, with Steckler, we looked at saltwater, work, later on  In fact, my colleague Andre uh, at Maryland when he joined Maryland, he got the salt water tank that I salvaged from this cause they were gonna throw it away.

00:47:17.958 --> 00:47:25.106
<v James Quintiere>And, he did very fundamental work and he did work on, ceiling jets in which he did it with salt water.

00:47:25.563 --> 00:47:32.612
<v James Quintiere>And he measured the velocity and, salt concentration so he could relate it to temperature.

00:47:33.072 --> 00:47:37.690
<v James Quintiere>And that work is quite unique, and advanced for its time.

00:47:38.690 --> 00:47:41.208
<v James Quintiere>But, it was never, extended.

00:47:41.594 --> 00:47:42.994
<v James Quintiere>look look at what.

00:47:43.867 --> 00:47:47.186
<v James Quintiere>Marshall did with salt water on ceiling jets.

00:47:47.376 --> 00:47:54.289
<v James Quintiere>And that was, that was like an extension of all of this work from the seventies and eighties.

00:47:54.789 --> 00:47:59.130
<v James Quintiere>And someone like Andre Marshall when he came to Maryland appreciated that.

00:47:59.579 --> 00:48:14.030
<v James Quintiere>That's why I think the Chinese are going to get into it, because I see papers by young Chinese I see that they're reading the literature very carefully.

00:48:14.411 --> 00:48:33.179
<v James Quintiere>Now, whether they're supervisor is forcing them to do this they're doing it based on their own, kind of motivation and the resources that exist around them at U S T C, they seem to have a respect and an embracement of, of that work.

00:48:33.547 --> 00:48:44.005
<v James Quintiere>if they have that and they carry it forward, I see that there's, there's a, a linkage there that improve, fire research through the work in China.

00:48:44.344 --> 00:48:47.184
<v James Quintiere>I hope we don't go to war before that time.

00:48:47.974 --> 00:48:48.724
<v James Quintiere>Uh, please

00:48:49.083 --> 00:48:53.204
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>don't, don't enough politics  in, in here.

00:48:53.204 --> 00:48:55.043
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I hope that's not the case ever.

00:48:55.373 --> 00:48:59.003
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Uh, where, where is horrible, what I've meant when I started this.

00:48:59.003 --> 00:48:59.844
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Is this with the

00:48:59.873 --> 00:49:00.994
<v James Quintiere>to study history.

00:49:01.143 --> 00:49:01.653
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Of course.

00:49:02.335 --> 00:49:14.297
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>but, uh, I, I think there finishing this episode on this, on this beautiful experiments you've you've conducted at NBS that, that were cornerstone for many further achievements of fire science.

00:49:14.666 --> 00:49:18.143
<v James Quintiere>one, one experiment, uh, that I, I didn't mention Okay?

00:49:18.153 --> 00:49:21.673
<v James Quintiere>work by Jerry Faith on turbulent wall fires.

00:49:21.893 --> 00:49:22.384
<v James Quintiere>Okay?

00:49:22.717 --> 00:49:29.590
<v James Quintiere>and he had a student, I think that student passed away early, but, he did work on turbulent wall Mm-hmm.

00:49:29.804 --> 00:49:34.443
<v James Quintiere>first he did like just hot plumes along the wall.

00:49:34.856 --> 00:49:38.001
<v James Quintiere>Then he did the laminate fire along the wall.

00:49:38.090 --> 00:49:44.710
<v James Quintiere>So he did, you know, can I get data for a laminate fire against the Hmm.

00:49:45.251 --> 00:49:46.931
<v James Quintiere>And how did he make those fires?

00:49:47.094 --> 00:49:49.083
<v James Quintiere>He made them in a simple way.

00:49:49.853 --> 00:49:52.923
<v James Quintiere>He wanted to predict the burning rate of those fires.

00:49:53.733 --> 00:50:07.353
<v James Quintiere>So he used, liquid fuel embedded into the wall where he could then know the evaporation, thermodynamics of that liquid, which is very simple kind of Hmm.

00:50:07.963 --> 00:50:10.204
<v James Quintiere>You don't have to worry about spiralizing wood.

00:50:10.650 --> 00:50:16.507
<v James Quintiere>And so if he knew that, he knew the burning rate very, very well.

00:50:17.391 --> 00:50:24.117
<v James Quintiere>so, they developed a theory for the laminate flame, uh, using B number type Hmm.

00:50:24.829 --> 00:50:33.351
<v James Quintiere>and they measured the temperature very carefully with, fine thermo couples and the velocity with, I think they used, uh, hot Wire.

00:50:33.692 --> 00:50:39.152
<v James Quintiere>But they, Jerry Faith was a, a really excellent, mean, he was, he was unbelievable.

00:50:39.592 --> 00:50:42.541
<v James Quintiere>uh, he was the editor of Combustion in Flame.

00:50:42.541 --> 00:50:46.431
<v James Quintiere>He was the editor a journal, uh, in Fluid Mechanics.

00:50:46.431 --> 00:50:49.672
<v James Quintiere>He was, he, he was remarkable person.

00:50:50.211 --> 00:50:52.012
<v James Quintiere>and so this was very careful work.

00:50:52.012 --> 00:50:57.889
<v James Quintiere>And then they extended it to the turbulent, field above it, with the same student.

00:50:57.889 --> 00:51:00.728
<v James Quintiere>And they made the same measurements and they made the same.

00:51:00.789 --> 00:51:10.818
<v James Quintiere>And they had a turbulent model that they, that they used, and got reasonable predictions even though they realized that there was a lot of radiation in those flames.

00:51:11.581 --> 00:51:13.860
<v James Quintiere>and they swept that under the rug a little bit.

00:51:14.320 --> 00:51:19.594
<v James Quintiere>But th that's a, that's a point where someone needs to go further.

00:51:20.083 --> 00:51:24.884
<v James Quintiere>you see, like the next step would've been, let's see how we could bring in the radiation.

00:51:24.884 --> 00:51:26.643
<v James Quintiere>Let's see how we could predict it.

00:51:27.137 --> 00:51:29.856
<v James Quintiere>how is that a function of the fuel were burning?

00:51:30.704 --> 00:51:31.704
<v James Quintiere>it be generalized?

00:51:31.804 --> 00:51:33.583
<v James Quintiere>Can we get a simple equation?

00:51:33.673 --> 00:51:38.864
<v James Quintiere>Or do we have to resort to CFD every time we wanna learn something?

00:51:39.155 --> 00:51:41.423
<v James Quintiere>those steps never were taken anymore.

00:51:42.054 --> 00:51:49.784
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I, I hope there are a lot of young researchers listening who, who, who, who seek their careers.

00:51:49.804 --> 00:51:50.534
<v James Quintiere>Yeah, yeah.

00:51:50.534 --> 00:51:50.773
<v James Quintiere>Yeah.

00:51:51.393 --> 00:51:59.797
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>And there is so many experiments that need to either a step further or maybe a revisit with a friendly update in a, uh, in the specs.

00:52:00.222 --> 00:52:04.351
<v James Quintiere>like any field, if you throw money at it, people will do stuff.

00:52:04.929 --> 00:52:07.088
<v James Quintiere>are not throwing enough money at fire.

00:52:07.809 --> 00:52:09.489
<v James Quintiere>throwing money at batteries now.

00:52:09.588 --> 00:52:10.668
<v James Quintiere>But, uh, Hmm.

00:52:11.199 --> 00:52:16.009
<v James Quintiere>I don't think the industry cares, just like the plastic industry didn't care.

00:52:16.289 --> 00:52:17.599
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So fire research fantastic.

00:52:17.599 --> 00:52:20.572
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Was byproduct of, like you said, the the fines they

00:52:20.572 --> 00:52:20.811
<v James Quintiere>got.

00:52:20.851 --> 00:52:30.521
<v James Quintiere>the use of plastics, uh, was a technological change in the way we live that, enabled fire to develop in different ways.

00:52:31.311 --> 00:52:43.768
<v James Quintiere>A and so, that was the, the spark really like batteries are now the, the spark that are saying, you know, we should do more fire research in batteries.

00:52:44.688 --> 00:52:48.079
<v James Quintiere>So there, there will always be new technologies that come about.

00:52:48.349 --> 00:52:54.965
<v James Quintiere>that will, you know, maybe people will invent fusion with those high temperatures, there will be a lot of fires.

00:52:55.385 --> 00:52:56.146
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>We'll see.

00:52:56.766 --> 00:53:06.545
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>The one thing I've learned after two years of doing this podcast, we create issues in fire quicker than, uh, than we generate solutions and people to who can solve them.

00:53:06.545 --> 00:53:08.786
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So we are not gonna get out of job anywhere soon.

00:53:09.155 --> 00:53:23.251
<v James Quintiere>No, the people in combustion may lose their jobs, but the people in fire will not because, and as I said, as investigators, uh, embrace this and the fire service embraces it, fire research should grow.

00:53:23.286 --> 00:53:23.909
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Beautiful.

00:53:23.936 --> 00:53:27.695
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>let's end this, uh, episode with this, uh, with this thought.

00:53:27.916 --> 00:53:31.719
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>May maybe one more thing I'll, I'll maybe publish it separately.

00:53:31.719 --> 00:53:34.248
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Like if you had a message to young people.

00:53:34.974 --> 00:53:36.463
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Just coming into fire.

00:53:36.463 --> 00:53:40.864
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>There's so many young people coming into fire science more than ever before.

00:53:41.273 --> 00:53:46.994
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>So many faculties open, so many good places to pursue career in fire.

00:53:47.427 --> 00:53:57.887
<v James Quintiere>Well, it's a stimulating field and it's a field that is rich in un discovery, so you can do a lot to contribute to it.

00:53:58.347 --> 00:54:11.443
<v James Quintiere>But the reality is, is that I think a lot of young people have graduated through fire research curriculum, but they don't stay in the field the field is not embracing.

00:54:12.641 --> 00:54:12.920
<v James Quintiere>a shame.

00:54:13.045 --> 00:54:29.139
<v James Quintiere>If you, if you ask how many fire protection engineering firms hire fire scientists or people who did a, a, maybe a somewhat arcane to them research topic in fire, they won't be the first on their list to hire.

00:54:29.536 --> 00:54:29.623
<v James Quintiere>Hmm.

00:54:29.909 --> 00:54:34.458
<v James Quintiere>So, the field is not in need of science.

00:54:34.871 --> 00:54:38.572
<v James Quintiere>The field is in need of tools to how to solve problems.

00:54:38.751 --> 00:54:40.641
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Well, we can use scientists

00:54:40.641 --> 00:54:41.461
<v James Quintiere>to, Yes.

00:54:41.481 --> 00:54:51.298
<v James Quintiere>And the way that works is like, you know, if somebody says, let's go to the moon and people throw money on that, then, then you figure out how to get off this planet.

00:54:51.759 --> 00:54:54.659
<v James Quintiere>But as soon as somebody says, who cares about the.

00:54:55.239 --> 00:54:56.159
<v James Quintiere>you see what happens?

00:54:56.233 --> 00:54:56.844
<v James Quintiere>mm-hmm.

00:54:57.148 --> 00:54:58.918
<v James Quintiere>fire is in that vein.

00:54:59.179 --> 00:55:00.898
<v James Quintiere>it's a drag on the economy.

00:55:01.088 --> 00:55:03.139
<v James Quintiere>It's not a promotion of economy.

00:55:03.849 --> 00:55:08.199
<v James Quintiere>so it's not like inventing a new thing and everything takes off.

00:55:08.199 --> 00:55:17.436
<v James Quintiere>And, and now, now you, you have Silicon Valley, fire degrades from, a commerce and economics.

00:55:17.637 --> 00:55:18.505
<v James Quintiere>It's a drag.

00:55:18.956 --> 00:55:19.675
<v James Quintiere>it's a loss.

00:55:19.826 --> 00:55:29.161
<v James Quintiere>But that's why I said if the fire, service community, the firefighters wake up say we need better tools That is, need science.

00:55:29.608 --> 00:55:30.809
<v James Quintiere>that may be the savior.

00:55:31.514 --> 00:55:39.554
<v James Quintiere>Lund is the only program that realizes this, that educates their people and then they go into the fire service.

00:55:40.186 --> 00:55:44.710
<v James Quintiere>So that is one seed that I haven't seen Grow beyond Lund

00:55:44.949 --> 00:55:47.329
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Now I, I, I see James, I see.

00:55:47.349 --> 00:55:49.188
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>See some promising seeds.

00:55:49.719 --> 00:55:55.268
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>Uh, fire, fire Safety Research Institute, ul, this, I, I really believe,

00:55:55.563 --> 00:55:58.106
<v James Quintiere>I, know, I commend those guys I,

00:55:58.896 --> 00:56:08.195
<v Wojciech Wegrzynski>I, really believe this will, this, this is a thing and yeah, let's well, I hope that your prediction that, uh, the golden era is still in front of us.

00:56:08.239 --> 00:56:08.860
<v James Quintiere>it's there.

00:56:08.931 --> 00:56:21.416
<v James Quintiere>I mean, look, it took Hottel and Emmons a long time to get, you know, some activity going in fire, so, It's there, is always going to exist on this planet.

00:56:21.800 --> 00:56:26.530
<v James Quintiere>And the as the need to understand it grows, the science will grow.

00:56:26.626 --> 00:56:27.425
<v James Quintiere>Fantastic.

00:56:27.583 --> 00:56:28.699
<v James Quintiere>Thank you very much.

00:56:29.175 --> 00:56:29.746
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>And that's it.

00:56:29.775 --> 00:56:33.536
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>This concludes the whole interview I had with professor James Quintiere.

00:56:33.945 --> 00:56:44.655
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>I'm really thankful to James for spending so much time with me and sharing so much of his thoughts about the us fire science, how it developed, how it grown.

00:56:45.262 --> 00:56:53.300
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>How it changed over the years and maybe some inspiration in How we can go back to the glorious times of the fire science research.

00:56:53.485 --> 00:57:00.264
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>In today's episode, we've talked a lot about how the experiments were carried and I think a good message to everyone listening.

00:57:00.264 --> 00:57:02.005
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>The researchers listening is that.

00:57:02.394 --> 00:57:04.045
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Many of those experiments.

00:57:04.585 --> 00:57:06.175
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Are done in Hades.

00:57:06.534 --> 00:57:10.135
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Like 40 years ago and they are still this stable.

00:57:10.331 --> 00:57:13.420
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Cases for validating our models.

00:57:13.780 --> 00:57:15.280
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>It's it's astonishing.

00:57:15.400 --> 00:57:20.891
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>What long lasting impact you can achieve with carefully planned experiments and.

00:57:21.038 --> 00:57:23.257
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Really well thought out fire science.

00:57:23.588 --> 00:57:35.378
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>It's a statement that's very contradictory to the modern science, where you're pushed to get papers published quickly, publish as many as you can, hopefully with high impact factors.

00:57:35.947 --> 00:57:39.367
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Look, this is like the exact opposite end of spectrum.

00:57:39.398 --> 00:57:44.318
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Doing a very carefully planned experiment, maybe taking a year or two, doing that.

00:57:44.378 --> 00:57:45.907
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Publishing a single paper.

00:57:45.940 --> 00:57:47.860
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Which still 40 years later.

00:57:48.221 --> 00:57:49.481
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>It's a basis of models.

00:57:49.481 --> 00:57:50.440
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>How amazing is that?

00:57:50.800 --> 00:57:52.721
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>If I had to choose.

00:57:53.050 --> 00:57:55.721
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Between writing a really, really good.

00:57:55.728 --> 00:57:59.927
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>paper that we'll continue making impact in few decades and, and.

00:58:00.045 --> 00:58:01.844
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>popping Salemi slices of research.

00:58:01.844 --> 00:58:08.485
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>I, I would highly recommend doing the former, I guess this is something we try with our fire science.

00:58:08.545 --> 00:58:09.085
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>The ITB.

00:58:09.474 --> 00:58:15.885
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>I'm not sure if we always accomplish that, we'll see in a few decades, but, Yeah, that's, that's something I aspire to and I highly.

00:58:15.998 --> 00:58:19.297
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Recommend that to any academic around.

00:58:19.297 --> 00:58:24.701
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>And I hope this interview with James, Can serve as an inspiration on how to achieve that.

00:58:25.481 --> 00:58:28.481
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>Thank you very much for tuning into the fire science show.

00:58:28.811 --> 00:58:31.780
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>And there's more great episodes coming your way.

00:58:31.780 --> 00:58:34.380
<v Wojciech Węgrzyński>So see here next Wednesday bye!.