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 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.
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.
Fire Technology is a peer-reviewed journal publishing scientific research dealing with the full range of actual, possible, and potential fire hazards facing humans and the environment. It publishes original contributions, both theoretical and empirical, that contribute to the solution of problems in fire safety and related fields. It is published by Springer in conjunction with the National Fire Protection Association and the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.
Avinash Kumar Agarwal 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.
Forman Arthur Williams is an American academic in the field of combustion and aerospace engineering who is Emeritus Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California San Diego.
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.
Ashwani K. Gupta is a British-American engineer and educator with research focus on combustion, fuels, fuel reforming, advanced diagnostics, High Temperature Air Combustion, and high-intensity distributed combustion, green combustion turbine, micro-combustion, and air pollution. He is an Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. Gupta is also Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland and Director of Combustion Laboratory. He is also an Affiliate Professor at Institute of Physical Science and Technology, University of Maryland which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences.
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.
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.
Filippo Berto is an Italian professor and engineer, who works on fracture mechanics and fatigue design for which he received several prestigious international awards.
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.
Nicos Ladommatos is a British mechanical engineer. From 2004, he was the Kennedy Professor for Mechanical Engineering and Head of Department for UCL Mechanical Engineering. In his career, he authored or co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed papers., specialising in the areas of combustion, combustion engines, fuel development and future fuels.
Neven Duić is a Croatian engineering professor at the University of Zagreb and vice president of the Croatian Academy of Engineering.
Safety Science is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Elsevier covering research on human and industrial safety. It is abstracted and indexed in Inspec, Scopus, and the Science Citation Index Expanded. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2022 impact factor of 6.1. The Scopus's CiteScore 2022 of the journal is 12.4. According to the Scimago Journal & Country Rank, this journal is Q1 in the multiple safety research domains.
