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The International Association of Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) is comprised of members from some 40 countries. This paper presents the Association's thinking, developed by the Management Committee, concerning pressing research needs for the coming 10 years presented as the IAFSS Agenda 2030 for a Fire Safe World. The research needs are couched in terms of two broad Societal Grand Challenges: (1) climate change, resiliency and sustainability and (2) population growth, urbanization and globalization. The two Societal Grand Challenges include significant fire safety components, that lead both individually and collectively to the need for a number of fire safety and engineering research activities and actions. The IAFSS has identified a list of areas of research and actions in response to these challenges. The list is not exhaustive, and actions within actions could be defined, but this paper does not attempt to cover all future needs.

Background: Wildland fires that occur near communities, in the wildland–urban interface (WUI), can inflict significant damage to urban structures. Although computational models are vital in wildfires, they often focus solely on wildland landscapes. Aim: We conducted a computational study to investigate WUI fire spread, encompassing both urban and wildland landscapes. Methods: We developed a 1D landscape-scale semi-physical model by integrating a semi-physical urban fire spread model into an Eulerian level set model of wildfire. The model includes ignition and spread through radiation, direct flame contact and ember deposition. Key results: Through a parametric study, we compare the relative change of spread rate from various structural properties and landscape layouts represented by model parameters, highlighting the significant impact of fire-resistant structure materials over surface treatments. Layout configurations play a pivotal role in fire spread, with isolated islands of combustibles effective in reducing spread rate, aligning with existing mitigation strategies. Conclusion: Despite using a 1D domain and limitations on spatial and temporal variability, our model provides insights into underlying phenomena observed in WUI fires and their mitigation. It offers early-stage development of strategies for managing structure materials and landscape layouts. Implications: Our model and findings provide insights into WUI fire dynamics, paving the way for advanced mitigation strategies. This paper introduces a 1D semi-physical model for WUI fires, integrating urban and wildland fire dynamics. It accounts for fire spread via direct flame contact, radiation and embers. Despite limited spatial and temporal variability, the model demonstrates the relative impact of structure properties and landscape layout on WUI fire spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The goal of the present research was to develop a video collection of simulated fires to investigate how people perceive growing building fires. In fire safety science, a critical factor to occupant responses to building fires is the pre-movement period, determined by how long it takes an individual to initiate taking protective action with an incipient fire. Key to studying the psychological processes that contribute to the duration of the pre-movement period is presenting human subjects with building fires. One approach used in previous research is to present videos of building fires to individuals via scenarios. The numerical simulations used to model fire dynamics can be used to render videos for these scenarios. However, such simulations have predominantly been used in fire protection engineering to design buildings and are relatively inaccessible to social scientists. Method: The present study documents a collection of videos, based on numerical simulations, which can be used by researchers to study human behavior in fire. These videos display developing fires in different types of rooms, growing at different rates, different smoke thickness, among other characteristics. As part of a validation study, participants were presented with subsets of the video clips and were asked to rate the perceived risk posed by the simulated fire. Results and discussion: We observed that ratings varied by the intensity and growth rate of the fires, smoke opacity, type of room, and where the viewpoint was located from the fire. These effects aligned with those observed in previous fire science research, providing evidence that the videos could elicit perceived risk using fire simulations. The present research indicates that future studies can utilize the video library of fire simulations to study human perceptions of developing building fires as situational factors are systematically manipulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to bring fundamental information on the coupling between combustion and thermal radiation occurring at flame scale. The study considers a simplified configuration corresponding to one-dimensional counterflow planar laminar diffusion flames subjected to time-evolving moderate-to-slow mixing conditions that are representative of fires. The flame simulations are performed assuming methane–air combustion and using two formulations: a simplified formulation featuring single-step chemistry and an optically thin flame radiation model; and a high-fidelity formulation featuring detailed chemistry and different radiation models based on solving the Radiative Transfer Equation combined with grey or non-grey descriptions of gas radiation properties – the non-grey description is based on a Weighted-Sum-of-Gray-Gases model. The simulations describe the gradual decrease in heat release rate resulting from the evolution towards slower mixing conditions, as well as the corresponding increase in the flame optical depth and decrease in peak flame temperature. Radiation extinction is observed at critically low values of the rate of mixing. The analysis demonstrates that for conditions before the extinction limit is reached, the flame belongs to the semi-unsteady regime in which mixing processes occurring in the outer diffusive layers of the flame are unsteady whereas heat release processes occurring in the inner reactive layer remain quasi-steady. In the semi-unsteady regime, the flame structure can be parametrised by an effective strain rate (or scalar dissipation rate) and remains close to the structure of radiating flames considered at steady state and subjected to the effective value of the strain rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]