Fire protection engineering is the application of science and engineering principles to protect people, property, and their environments from the harmful and destructive effects of fire and smoke. It encompasses engineering which focuses on fire detection, suppression and mitigation and fire safety engineering which focuses on human behavior and maintaining a tenable environment for evacuation from a fire. In the United States 'fire protection engineering' is often used to include 'fire safety engineering'.
Smouldering or smoldering is the slow, flameless form of combustion, sustained by the heat evolved when oxygen directly attacks the surface of a condensed-phase fuel. Many solid materials can sustain a smouldering reaction, including coal, cellulose, wood, cotton, tobacco, cannabis, peat, plant litter, humus, synthetic foams, charring polymers including polyurethane foam and some types of dust. Common examples of smouldering phenomena are the initiation of residential fires on upholstered furniture by weak heat sources, and the persistent combustion of biomass behind the flaming front of wildfires.
Peter B. Sunderland is a Professor of Fire Protection Engineering and Keystone Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He earned a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University, a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, he worked at the National Center for Microgravity Research at the NASA Glenn Research Center.
The International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF), a non-profit organization, is professional association of the wildland fire community. IAWF is an independent organization, not affiliated with any private or public agencies. It purpose is to offer a common and neutral ground for the discussion of important and often controversial wildland fire issues. The organization has a 15-member board of directors. It aims to include members in the areas of wildland fire management, research, suppression, and policy.
The Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) is a professional society for fire protection engineering established in 1950 and incorporated as an independent organization in 1971. It is the professional society representing those practicing the field of fire protection engineering. The Society has over 5,000 members and more than 120 chapters and over 20 student chapters worldwide. SFPE also includes the SFPE foundation with the following mission "Enhancing the scientific understanding of fire and its interaction with the social, natural and built environments".
Dougal Drysdale is a Professor Emeritus in Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Edinburgh and member of the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering.
José Luis Torero is a professor in fire protection engineering. He is currently the head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London (UK). He took this appointment after two years (2017-2019) as the John L. Bryan Chair in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering and Director of the Center for Disaster Resilience in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland (USA). He was formerly the Head of the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland (2012-2017). He is Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) since 2010, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering since 2014 and The Royal Society of Edinburgh (UK) since 2008. He held the BRE/RAE Chair in Fire Safety Engineering and directed the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering from 2004 to 2012. In 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, being gazetted in the NSW Government Gazette by the then Governor of New South Wales His Excellency General, the Honourable David Hurley AC DSC(Rtd).
Howard Wilson Emmons (1912–1998) was an American professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Harvard University. During his career he conducted original research on fluid mechanics, combustion and fire safety. Today he is most widely known for his pioneering work in the field of fire safety engineering. He has been called "the father of modern fire science" for his contribution to the understanding of flame propagation and fire dynamics. He also helped design the first supersonic wind tunnel, identified a signature of the transition to turbulence in boundary layer flows, and was the first to observe compressor stall in a gas turbine compressor. He initiated studies on diffusion flames inside a boundary layer, and Emmons problem is named after him. He was eventually awarded the Timoshenko Medal by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the 1968 Sir Alfred Egerton Gold Medal from The Combustion Institute.
The Arthur B. Guise Medal is awarded annually by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers and recognizes eminent achievement in the advancement of the science and technology of fire protection engineering. It is named in memory of the achievements of Arthur Guise.
David Allen Lucht is an American engineer and fire safety expert. His career was devoted to public service in government, academia and the nonprofit sector. He served as the Ohio State Fire Marshal; the first presidential appointee to serve in the United States Fire Administration and the inaugural head of the graduate degree fire protection engineering program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he served for 25 years
Avinash Kumar Agarwal is director of Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur. He is an Indian mechanical engineer, tribologist and a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is known for his studies on internal combustion engines, Emissions, alternate fuels and CNG engines and is an elected fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (2013), Society of Automotive Engineers, US (2012), National Academy of Science, Allahabad (2018), Royal Society of Chemistry, UK (2018), International Society for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (2016), and Indian National Academy of Engineering (2015). The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 2016. Agarwal has been bestowed upon Prestigious J C Bose Fellowship of Science and Engineering Research Board. Government of India. Agarwal is among the top ten highly cited researchers (HCR) of 2018 from India, as per Clarivate Analytics, an arm of Web of Science.
James G. Quintiere is an American mechanical engineer known for his work on fire protection engineering and fire safety. He is professor emeritus in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering. A noted expert on arson, he has testified in criminal trials regarding the causes of certain fires, such as the one that occurred in the Waco siege and killed over 80 people. He has also studied the causes of the collapse of the World Trade Center, concluding that it was probably caused by faulty fireproofing.
Combustion Theory and Modelling is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research on combustion. The editors-in-chief are Moshe Matalon and Mitchell D. Smooke. It is published by Taylor & Francis and was established in 1997. The founding editors are John W. Dold and Mitchell D. Smooke.
Erica Kuligowski is an American social research scientist investigating human behavior during emergencies and the performance of evacuation models in disasters. She currently works at RMIT university in Melbourne (Australia). Kuligowski used to work the Engineering Lab of the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducting research on several fire disasters including the NIST Hurricane Maria Project.
Anita J. Hill is an Australian researcher in materials and process engineering. She is a former Chief Scientist of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the current Executive Director of Future Industries at CSIRO. Her research focuses on the transport of atoms, ions and small molecules in condensed matter, notably using positron annihilation spectroscopy.
Samuel L. Manzello is a technical advisor at Reax Engineering and visiting professor Tohoku University (Japan). He has worked on microgravity droplet combustion, droplet-surface interaction, soot formation in well-stirred reactor/plug flow reactor, fire-structure interaction, and structure vulnerabilities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires.
Fred Mannering is an American scientist/engineer who is most known for the development and application of statistical and econometric methods to study highway safety, economics, travel behavior, and a variety of engineering-related problems.
Neven Duić is a Croatian engineering professor at the University of Zagreb and vice president of the Croatian Academy of Engineering.
Ruggiero Lovreglio is an Italian academic based in Auckland, New Zealand. He is an associate professor at Massey University and a Rutherford Discovery Fellow for Royal Society Te Apārangi. His research is focused on large-scale and small-scale evacuation dynamics and safety training using emerging technologies, such as virtual reality and augmented reality.
Enrico Ronchi is an Italian Associate Professor at the Department of Fire Safety Engineering and the Department of Transport and Roads at Lund University, Sweden. He is known for his research in evacuation modeling, human behavior in fire, and fire safety engineering.
