177 - Physics-Based Modelling of Fire Spread with Francesco Restuccia

Transcript

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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Its celebration time.

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Fire Science got another ERC grant that is relevant to fire safety engineering.

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For me as a scientist it's really a thing to cherish, because ERC, the European Research Council grants, are the Formula One of science.

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It's the dream and as you can imagine, those grants being the holy grail for literally every single researcher out there.

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They are so competitive and so difficult to obtain almost impossible.

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And yet we had ERC grant.

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But Professor Ruben van C two years ago awarded ERC starting grant and Ruben is well into his research that we've talked about in the podcast two years ago.

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And today I have a possibility to choose another ERC laureate.

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That is Dr Francesco Restuccia from King's College London, my very good friend, and I am so happy for Francesco.

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So, francesco, you know him from the podcast.

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He was talking here about batteries and a lot of his recent research is about fire safety of batteries and he indeed does some amazing work in that space.

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But the grant is completely different.

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The grant is all about modeling wildfires and his approach to modeling to merge tons of other models that already exist, to find scales at which the transition happens, the regimes change, and create new, better models that would have higher technical complexity or better accuracy than the current ones and yet be applicable and usable, which will definitely create space for new frontiers of fire safety engineering real-time modeling of wildfire, progress, sensitivity studies for fuel management, perhaps assistance for management of WE communities A lot of possibilities that may open after this grant is completed and after Francesco integrates the knowledge that's around and adds his own research on top of that.

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Anyway, this episode has kind of two parts.

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So two-thirds of the episode we discuss about the ERC grant itself.

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So we discuss the models and everything that Francesco wants to do in his grant, and the last one-third of the episode is more towards young researchers who also share the dream of getting an ERC grant on their own.

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So the last part we've spent just talking about the process of obtaining such a massive grant and some, let's say, coaching recommendations for people on what does it mean to write an ESC grant?

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What are you looking for?

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What should you focus on?

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Perhaps, that said, some good mentoring.

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Francesco is one of the best mentors I know in the space of fire science, so I'm sure these are some useful advice to young scholars.

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Anyway, let's stop talking and give the microphone to the man.

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So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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Welcome to the Fire science Show.

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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I am joined today again by Dr Francesco Restuccia.

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Hey, francesco, good to have you back in the show.

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Thank you again for the invitation.

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Ojec Nice to see you.

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And look, mate, a man who lists two Fire Science Show episodes at the top of his CV got the ERC.

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I'm kind of not surprised.

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Joe Rogan can make you a US president, so I guess this podcast helps you in the career a little bit.

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No, yeah, I always enjoy coming to the Five Science Show, also because you make me think about the problems I work on and having to explain them, and so, yeah, it's always really, really interesting, and I listen to all of your episodes.

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I still don't know how you managed to make so many episodes and where you find the time, but they're fantastic.

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You're in the middle of making one.

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So let's say you have insight to the backend and, anyway, fantastic job on the batteries and everything you've been doing.

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But the ERC you've submitted is so far away from the world of battery that I'm used to interview you in.

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So let me do it properly.

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Let me read out the starting grant name that you've just got Wildfires and Climate Change, physics-based Modeling of Fire Spread in a Changing World Acronym Fire Mod.

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So this is what you just got funded in the ERC scheme.

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For those who don't know, who are listening, this is like this, is it?

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That's the top.

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You cannot go any further, at least in the European Union and the islands around it.

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So, francesco, tell me the genesis of that, like what made you write a wildfire and climate proposal and how long that has been in your head.

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So my research group so I run the research group Heat and Fire Lab, and my group, as you say, predominantly focuses on batteries has kind of three strands.

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So I have the heat side, where I do thermal management.

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I look at biomass, I look a little bit on hydrogen and then I have the fire dynamics part, and the fire dynamics is sort of split into two.

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One is the fire dynamics of batteries.

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I look at fire spread, I look at ignition, I look at suppression.

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Myself and my team and I had currently one, two PhD students who have been working on wildfire, but again it's an area that's smaller in my group.

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I was interested in wildfire for a long time because from a fire dynamics perspective it's one of the most complex phenomena to study at a lab scale and a large scale because there are many, many differences and so there are a lot of similarities and in fact I used a lot of what I learned in my past work.

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Both in the ignition work that I did during my PhD with Guillermo Reina at Imperial, in my battery work, especially the fire spread in batteries.

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I saw some similarities and some differences and what really interested me on wildfires for a long, long time has been the fact that they can do so much damage when they're uncontrolled.

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I come from Italy.

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We have wildfires all the time.

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I come from southern Italy, but if you look at Greece, you look at Spain, you look at Portugal, there are a lot of very large scale wildfires and we've been doing a lot of work operationally across the world to try and understand them.

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But there is still a lot to be done, and so I started really looking at this maybe five years ago.

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I started thinking about this and then it took a few years to develop sort of an idea of what I thought I could contribute, and so a lot of my current past work before the CRC has really been on the sensitivity.

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So PhD student Imogen Richards in my group has really focused on the sensitivity of physical parameters for wildfires, and so I was really interested in understanding how different variables affect the output.

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Right, all of our models are models.

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When we do modeling, they have an input, they have an output, they have multiple inputs usually, and often we look at multiple outputs, and what really interested me for the last couple of years was okay, how does my input change my output?

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So I often think of data as if my data is garbage going in.

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The data I'm getting out is definitely going to be garbage.

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And so if I'm doing a model and I have an experimental data point, my experimental data point will have some error.

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And how will that error, how will that change affect my output?

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Now, in the real world, in wildfires, it's not an error, it's the variability of a fuel, variability of nature, right?

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So you can have an area which has a certain moisture content on a certain day, in a certain wind, in a certain slope, and then another day, a week later, completely different boundary conditions.

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And so I really wanted to look at and I looked at the past models, because there's been many models on ignition, on spread, and I want to really look at the fundamentals to understand how we can scale these fire models.

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I had some episodes on wildfires, a lot of them on wildfires in the fire science shows, as you know, and models do kind of exist, like we have this Rothamilz model which lasts for I don't know how many decades already, but it's been the basis of the 1970s.

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Exactly, it's 50 years almost.

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Happy 50th birthday.

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Anyway, we have those tools to allow us to model or predict to some extent the wildfires.

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Everyone is familiar with the maps of fire hazard.

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Right, we have the tools that assist firefighters on the scene with this likely spread of fires.

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So is there really such a gap?

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If you could extract one thing that's lacking from the current models, that justifies doing this massive research project Absolutely.

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Yeah, so it's a sort of two problem, right?

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When you do a model, you have, let's say, y-axis and x-axis.

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If we look at an axis, y-axis physical fidelity, x-axis applicability, right.

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So the further right bottom you are, the most applicable it is, but maybe it has less physics.

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So a Rotterdam model, so any pure empirical wildfire model that maybe has a few physical input parameters but is very empirical or operational models like a Rotterdam model really sit on lower physical fidelity but applicability to many, many scenarios.

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I'll stop you for a second, because I realize the audience may not be that familiar with Rotterdam model.

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It's not something most fire engineers would use.

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So Rotterdam model is basically one equation and you put up things like slope moisture.

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Is there wind in it as well?

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Yes, there's wind, so you look at wind.

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So effectively.

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Rotterdam model takes a flame and it has a contact with the fuel.

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That flame has some radiation, some convection and then some solid mass transport.

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No, no, no, you're over.

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So variables you put in are effectively size, temperature, moisture.

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So you have a few physical variables you put in and then you get out a rate of spread Exactly.

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So super simple, like one equation.

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You put up the variables, you get the rate of spread.

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Then that's the most applicable because it takes you a second to solve.

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But it lacks the physical depth of everything and the other end of scale.

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The other end of scale is so, exactly, if you go to the very high physical fidelity so, for example, physics-based direct numerical simulation of wildfires then you are very, very detailed so you can focus on which aspects.

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So let's say, you really want to get detailed kinetics, you really want to understand how that fuel degradation happens.

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You can get a very, very good understanding, but it's very limited in application because you can't extract those results for many other results and so it's very, very high physical fidelity but very low applicability to diverse scenarios.

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Let's say, so those are the two extremes.

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You have stuff in the middle, right.

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That's called reduced order models.

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And so in the middle between fully empirical and fully physics-based, you have reduced order models.

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Those are either semi-empirical models or there's lots of AI and data-trained models.

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Those are somewhere in the middle, right?

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So you have some physics and some operational aspects, some empirical aspects, and every model has advantages and disadvantages.

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The best you know.

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If you really want to understand how a fuel will degrade and the kinetics of a fuel for a very, very specific scenario, then you do lots of detailed kinetics, right.

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If you don't really care about that, then you say well, I have so many heterogeneous fuels.

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I just want to understand roughly the rate of spread in this with these physical conditions.

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Then you have the fully empirical model.

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But to understand the changing fire regimes and understand the different theories, because, again, when I look at the physics-based fully physics-based I give you the example of kinetics, but I could also say I can take a full physics-based one for atmospheric models, right?

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So I say, well, I want to understand the very large, large scale spread of these clouds of megafires that maybe are spreading very, very largely.

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Then I would use a very detailed atmospheric model to understand that sort of propagation.

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Or let's say I wanted to understand the transition between smoldering and flaming fires, which are really different scales, right, so some are centimeters per hour, the other ones are meters or kilometers per hour, depending how fast it's going, and so then you would need a model that's very good for that flaming or smoldering regime.

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Or let's say you wanted to understand the risk okay, this is less for wildfires but in general for fire modeling the risk of deflagration, right, then you focus on very specific type of models where pressure becomes very important, and so it really depends on which physical variable and to establish fire spread transport thresholds for diverse environments.

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So let's say you're looking at centimeters versus kilometers.

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We use different models for physics-based, and that's actually the problem that I encounter when I use a lot of models.

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Every model is useful for some scenario, right Okay?

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so you would use FDS for, let's say, compartment scale fire.

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But FDS is tricky when you want to do urban configuration and it's tricky if you want to investigate a matchstick, for example, because the scale is too small.

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So you have models for different scale and in your applicability versus technical complexity thing I would assume that some sort of crown achievement would be technically advanced model which would be as applicable as Rotterman model, exactly.

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I think that's the future.

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Yeah, so when I say what is my ideal model, it would be a physics-based model that has the same applicability range as a raw thermal model.

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Right, because then you can get very detailed physics included and incorporated into something that's very diversely applicable.

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But in here applicability could be also understood as user-friendliness or the difficulty in use of the model.

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So Rotterdam model is extremely easy to use because you basically can make a spreadsheet and you just put in your slope, your moisture, your wind and you get the outcome.

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Or you have already made packages that can import a topographical map of your terrain and just release the fire and it already knows the wind, already knows the snow.

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It's so easy to apply.

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Yet the extreme complex models you've mentioned DNS modeling of the fuel package Jesus Christ that's.

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I got chills when you told me that because I know how much work would be setting up that model.

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So is there any shortcut that we could apply those complex models in a simple way, like perhaps automate them to some way?

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Is there any shortcut that we could apply those complex models in a simple way, like perhaps automate them to some way?

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So yes, if we can find the thresholds for applicability, which is actually so if you look at the summary page of my grant, I had to write for the EU like a half a pager of you know why is this important as a project.

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And I think if we can find the scales where changing fire regimes actually change, right, so if we can look at temporal and spatial scales to understand those changing regimes, fires are driven by different heat.

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The dominant heat transfer mechanism changes as the fire changes, right, so you could have convection driven, radiation driven.

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So if we can find those changing fire regimes, when we include vegetation dynamics which is really the tricky part when we look at this from wildfires, then we can start scaling up maybe those fine mesh models that you were talking about, where we have all the complexity to larger grid sizes and not lose accuracy.

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And then sort of the third aspect.

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So that's all heat and modeling-based, but the third aspect which is fundamental from fire is also understanding the effects of the different fire spread regimes, right.

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So if I have a regime that's a fast fire I really enjoyed last two weeks ago.

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It was a paper in Nature and it was the science and it was the cover and it was fast fires right, and I said, oh fast, what do they mean by fast?

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Then they meant fast spreading.

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But when we can look at those let's say, fast or slow fires and we can integrate the different behaviors of both in our model, then we can make a very predictive tool right.

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Because if we have a predictive tool that can also be used operationally I think that's sort of the long-term vision of where I think we eventually need a FHIR model to be Then you can say, okay, those FHIR risk maps that you mentioned, actually we can do something a lot more accurate for this specific scenario.

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So let's say, we have a risk of FHIR here, we plug it into a quick model, hopefully, and that quick model will tell us, yes, no, and this spread or this spread right.

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That's sort of the long-term goal, I think, where fire modeling can go, because, as you said, there's lots of fire spread models and they're very useful in different scenarios.

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I've been calling smoldering fires the slow fires since always and I'm very happy that science has taken the fire science nomenclature for fires and now applies them on the covers.

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That's good on the covers.

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That's good, do you think?

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Because in your paper I find a lot of like really interesting things, and then you could expect that from ESC grants up to like using satellite readings, remote sensing and everything.

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So immediately in my head I see this applicability of a model where you basically are in a part of a terrain and you know the topography from the GIS maps, you know the current weather from the satellites, you know where the fire is from your remote sensing units, and then everything happens on the back end and just provides you with an accurate, quick, robust prediction.

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Is this this high end of applicability that you're?

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talking about Exactly that.

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So if I was to summarize that in a sentence right, you want a holistic, real-time risk prediction and fuel management tool that's based on identifiable fuel and landscape, right?

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Because if you know the landscape, as you said, and you know the fuel, then you can either have the risk prediction or the fuel management prediction.

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If we want to manage that fuel instead all in one tool, yeah, that's, I think, the goal, that's, I think, where we want to be with a fire model, let's say, in 10 years' time.

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And what's stopping us from having it right now?

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Identifying the driving, heat transfer and chemical thresholds for the varying scales.

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So, when we look at satellites right, so you mentioned Rotterdam in the 1970s.

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Then we had a lot of satellites used for wildfire protection since 2005.

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So it's been 20 years.

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But there's a size limit, right.

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There's a grid and a satellite image will have a certain scale, and then there's even the larger ones, the atmospheric ones, for very, very large scale.

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But identifying the thresholds for the varying scales is what's missing at the moment, so Finiacal.

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If you remember, there was a paper in the Presidio of the National Academy of Sciences about 10 years ago where they really looked at that convection-driven fire spread.

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So that's identifying a threshold, right, that's identifying the heat transfer mechanism for that specific type.

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If we had that for more types and not just convection, and not just one type of fuel, that's kind of what's missing at the moment, in my opinion.

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Guillermo wrote an accolade to nature about that work Fantastic work, fantastic experimental and theoretical work in my opinion.

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Yeah, it was a great paper.

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And those gaps, so you must have proposed a way forward to solve it.

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If you got this five-year funding, yeah, what are the next steps for you and your group?

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How do you think we can move towards incorporating all of those models and identifying those scale challenges?

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So obviously, yeah, we can't work on everything right.

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So I've given you lots and lots of problems and lots and lots of variables that can be studied, but obviously we can't focus on all of them.

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And so, as you can read on my fact sheet for the grant, if you have a look, I sort of focus on three different methods in parallel.

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And so, again, I'm interested in the prediction and understanding of the occurrence of uncontrolled fires and I'm interested in a physical, fundamental physical model.

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So again, there's lots of different types of models.

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I really am interested in advancing the physical model of fire spread process for different conditions and different fuel types and so sort of.

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I look at three methods in parallel.

00:20:52.843 --> 00:20:55.980
That's what my group would like to look at in this project.

00:20:55.980 --> 00:21:04.721
The first one is studying fires across temporal and spatial scales, right To understand those, changing fire regimes and bringing in vegetation dynamics.

00:21:04.721 --> 00:21:14.455
The second one is understanding fire on multiple scales and that will help us scale up from those, you know, small scale fine mesh models to large grid sizes.

00:21:14.455 --> 00:21:28.005
And then the last one is to integrate that effect of you call them slow and fast fire, so integrating the effect of smoldering, combustion into the modeling of fire spread, just something that is not done often, and that's sort of the methodology and tools.

00:21:28.425 --> 00:21:30.090
And again, the wider context.

00:21:30.090 --> 00:21:34.221
If I look back, you know lots of people already work on wildfires, and you know this already.

00:21:34.221 --> 00:21:37.801
But the larger aspect is really the human side as well.

00:21:37.801 --> 00:21:41.616
You know we have over a billion people a year impacted by wildfire smoke.

00:21:41.616 --> 00:21:51.103
If I look at European Union alone you know I'm again from Italy we have over 4 billion euros of wildfire cost a year right Worldwide.

00:21:51.103 --> 00:21:57.788
We emit from wildfires over 2000 megatons of CO2 a year, and so it's a larger scale problem.

00:21:57.788 --> 00:22:02.631
It's not just the engineering and the fire science one that we're interested in, it's also the health aspects and so on.

00:22:02.631 --> 00:22:08.703
Again, I focus on the engineering because that's my expertise, but the wildfire problem is much larger than just this one.

00:22:09.131 --> 00:22:17.050
I also like that you've included the climate aspect in your proposal and in the B1 that you've sent me.

00:22:17.050 --> 00:22:33.432
You've shown the Arctic region and different types of of wildfire, wildlife or vegetation interactions that can be happening there, and also smoldering, like transition from climbing to smoldering, smoldering to flaming.

00:22:33.432 --> 00:22:34.974
Can you comment on that?

00:22:34.974 --> 00:22:41.497
Why you've picked this part of the world and how does that connect you with the climate thing.

00:22:41.517 --> 00:22:42.619
Great question, question again.

00:22:42.619 --> 00:22:44.946
So different vegetation.

00:22:44.946 --> 00:22:50.324
So I picked different fuel areas and different fuel properties and you pointed out one.

00:22:50.324 --> 00:22:56.000
So the sort of Arctic ones was an example I used because there's been a lot of recent data on Arctic ones.

00:22:56.000 --> 00:23:02.388
I also picked ones more Mediterranean because I was interested in seeing how there is data on fuel.

00:23:02.388 --> 00:23:10.057
So I wanted to look at the data on the different fuel properties of different fuels in different areas to have a better understanding of ignition properties of them.

00:23:10.250 --> 00:23:13.656
So the first part of fire spread is the fire to ignite right.

00:23:13.656 --> 00:23:27.816
And so there's been a lot of work on ignition and I wanted to bring together that work that already exists on ignition, especially North America, Arctic and Europe, to differentiate if I could see which physical variable is most important there.

00:23:27.816 --> 00:23:29.661
And that brings us back to the sensitivity work.

00:23:29.661 --> 00:23:31.757
My PhD student, Imogen Richards, does.

00:23:31.757 --> 00:23:42.875
So a lot of this work we have already done sort of a feasibility work before in her PhD thesis is to sort of get a better understanding of the physical parameters, sensitivity to change.

00:23:43.196 --> 00:23:49.974
So if I have, let's say, that Arctic fuel and it had a 10% difference in moisture, how will that change my ignition?

00:23:49.974 --> 00:23:59.376
How will that change my spread, If it's 20%, or if it's a wind change of 10%, or if it's a terrain change, slope change of 10%, how will that change my output?

00:23:59.376 --> 00:24:06.650
And so sort of having a database of fuel properties from all those different areas will help me then make a model that's more applicable.

00:24:06.650 --> 00:24:15.982
Because if I can say, well, actually, Arctic okay, let's simplify it infinitely let's say Arctic, Polish and Italian terrain, they're all behaving identically, even though they're very different.

00:24:15.982 --> 00:24:18.439
Now they're not, but hypothetically they are right.

00:24:18.439 --> 00:24:29.474
Then the input in my model let's say you're the user who wants to use an operational model when you go click input, you can choose any terrain.

00:24:29.474 --> 00:24:29.936
Right, it won't matter.

00:24:29.936 --> 00:24:38.471
Obviously there are differences, and so then you'll have to choose the terrain that matches most the problem you're trying to solve, and so you'll have a database there that you can use for inputs and you'll know what the sensitivity of that input is.

00:24:38.872 --> 00:24:39.492
Yeah.

00:24:39.492 --> 00:24:51.586
So in other words, you could expect that a fire in Siberia, a fire in southern Italy, in the middle of Poland and in Berkeley, those are four completely different wildfires.

00:24:51.586 --> 00:24:59.284
And today I don't think the Rothamil model could predict the boreal fire at all because it did not have the smoldering component in it.

00:24:59.284 --> 00:25:04.781
So, by definition, you would most likely have different models for each of those.

00:25:04.781 --> 00:25:39.817
Yes, and in a way, those differences in your variables would be hidden within the empirical constraints of those models, in each of them, somewhere Exactly of gravity for fires, you know where, instead of defining a model for each of them, you understand what makes the difference between a fire in Calabria versus a fire in Siberia and because you know the difference, you know when the regime changes and when different variables start to be the key players.

00:25:39.817 --> 00:25:40.961
That's brilliant.

00:25:40.961 --> 00:25:42.002
Yeah, exactly that's the goal.

00:25:43.051 --> 00:25:44.416
That's all of the problem to solve.

00:25:44.416 --> 00:25:47.337
But then you obviously need more inputs to do that right.

00:25:47.337 --> 00:25:52.260
And so let's say that you let's use that remote sensing you mentioned since you mentioned satellites and remote sensing.

00:25:52.260 --> 00:26:11.728
If we can then have enhanced remote sensing to say, actually we know what, these are the differences that we're looking for so we can use an input data, that aspect that we, the model, we modelers, say this is what we need and hopefully you can make it automated, as you say, so we can extract some of that data as it comes in right, then we can use enhanced remote sensing to inform our model.

00:26:11.728 --> 00:26:23.519
And that's, I think, how you eventually you'll reach a real time risk prediction, because then you'll know some variables about the area you're in, but you don't need to know every single variable, because if you needed to know every single variable your model would take.

00:26:23.519 --> 00:26:30.816
It's fantastic from a scientific point of view, but it would take months to run and so it's not very useful for a prediction or real-time prediction.

00:26:31.490 --> 00:26:36.460
One thing that I've missed in the project, and it becomes very apparent to me that it's necessary.

00:26:36.460 --> 00:26:40.096
Perhaps it's there, I just have not seen this how do you quantify the fuel packages?

00:26:40.096 --> 00:26:43.576
Do you have any idea for automated quantifying the fuel packages?

00:26:43.576 --> 00:26:54.539
Because if you want it to be super user friendly, uh, you cannot have everything and the user have to provide you correct the distribution of species available in the local flora so.

00:26:54.779 --> 00:26:56.523
So I have some ideas on that.

00:26:56.523 --> 00:27:02.146
I'm still testing them, so I think, yeah, I have a few threads that I'm trying there.

00:27:02.146 --> 00:27:04.711
On fuel packages, that's a fantastic question, wojciech.

00:27:04.711 --> 00:27:16.616
At the moment you can find, for example let's simplify it massively, which I think we'll never get to this point, but let's say you compare that yellow fuel versus green fuel, right Dry versus wet, right.

00:27:16.616 --> 00:27:19.057
That's for a user very easy to see.

00:27:19.057 --> 00:27:21.238
Look at the picture like oh, this is yellow, this is green.

00:27:21.238 --> 00:27:32.741
I think that's not realistic, like you're never going to get to such a granularity of a seal package, so you need something more detailed.

00:27:32.741 --> 00:27:33.967
But how detailed to make it is actually part of this project.

00:27:33.967 --> 00:27:37.480
So so one of my work packages is literally figuring out how, how granular does it have to be?

00:27:37.862 --> 00:27:41.394
so again, sensitivity, where, when it starts making uh, impact, correct?

00:27:41.394 --> 00:27:49.637
I'm asking that because you know, know, in the Fire Science Show we are very, to some extent, connected to buildings Because of me I'm a building person.

00:27:49.637 --> 00:27:51.676
Guillermo once called me a building person.

00:27:51.676 --> 00:27:53.636
I found that really funny.

00:27:53.636 --> 00:28:22.670
Anyway, as a building person, you know, I try to see links between what you are doing and what we're missing in the world of compartment fires, because it's the same, you know, not the exact same problem, but it's the same drivers, you know the same heat transfers, the same pyrolysis process, moisture perhaps to a lesser content, but the prevalence of polymers and everything to some extent reassembles the moisture problem in wildfires.

00:28:22.730 --> 00:28:31.451
So whenever you explain the model for wildfires, I in my head it immediately makes the link how could we have something like that in the buildings?

00:28:31.451 --> 00:28:38.734
You know, and it is very interesting to me if we could have similar models like I just, you know, have a 360 cam.

00:28:38.734 --> 00:28:40.239
I put it into a compartment.

00:28:40.239 --> 00:28:50.640
It immediately knows what fuels I have in the compartment, builds me a model, solves the CFD and tells me how quickly it's going to flash over and how likely it's going to spread.

00:28:50.640 --> 00:28:55.690
That would be a phenomenal thing, perhaps if someone's listening and wants to write a second.

00:28:55.690 --> 00:28:58.251
You see a long compartment fires.

00:28:58.251 --> 00:29:03.355
Just the same as Francesco, but in buildings, parts too that could work out.

00:29:03.355 --> 00:29:26.896
Anyway, I think this remote identification of fuels at the level of variables that are important to solve, that would be a phenomenal breakthrough, because this is what moves your applicability on your applicability charts, this is what moves it to the right, because that takes so much burden of the user of the software.

00:29:27.569 --> 00:29:33.644
And, as you know, and as anyone who looks at wildfire knows, some of those properties are known right.

00:29:33.644 --> 00:29:36.799
So we know that there's a difference between dead and live fuels.

00:29:36.799 --> 00:29:39.470
We know there's a difference when we do modeling of the physics.

00:29:39.470 --> 00:29:42.174
We know there's a difference between bound and free water in a fuel.

00:29:42.174 --> 00:29:53.675
We know there's a very, very big difference in fire when your surface area to volume ratio changes, right, that's a very big effect, and so that really changes the ability of your fuel to ignite, right Surface area to volume ratio.

00:29:53.675 --> 00:30:05.763
And so there are physical parameters that we know very, very well, and so it's sort of bringing those together for those thresholds into eventually a tool, as you say, that is easy to use, because then it's more applicable.

00:30:06.005 --> 00:30:06.244
Yeah.

00:30:06.244 --> 00:30:10.776
So because you're starting, I'm not going to ask you about what's going to be the end.

00:30:10.776 --> 00:30:11.973
That's the point of VRC.

00:30:12.857 --> 00:30:13.309
Exactly so.

00:30:13.309 --> 00:30:15.516
Everything I've been telling you is what I thought about until now.

00:30:15.516 --> 00:30:20.631
I haven't started this project yet, so it's great because it can evolve as I work through the project.

00:30:20.631 --> 00:30:21.613
It starts in March.

00:30:22.634 --> 00:30:27.298
But I can interrogate you on what we've learned over the last decade.

00:30:27.298 --> 00:30:28.400
That made it possible?

00:30:28.400 --> 00:30:40.655
Because there's a transient nature of the research and ERC is a highly competitive scheme and I bet there have been people applying for ESC grants with wildfires.

00:30:40.655 --> 00:30:48.758
When I was attending an ESC training in 2018-19, I think that's when we first started talking about doing ESCs.

00:30:48.758 --> 00:30:51.676
At the same time, I just dropped a dream.

00:30:51.676 --> 00:30:53.817
I'm happy that you fulfilled it for both of us.

00:30:53.817 --> 00:31:00.219
Anyway, in 2018-19, I attended this training where a lady told us oh yeah, there's wildfires.

00:31:00.219 --> 00:31:01.855
This starts to be interesting.

00:31:01.855 --> 00:31:03.897
This could be sexy enough for ERC.

00:31:03.897 --> 00:31:06.613
So I'm sure a lot of people got the same advice.

00:31:06.613 --> 00:31:12.333
A lot of people probably have tried to, but there have been massive, massive breakthroughs.

00:31:12.333 --> 00:31:27.664
We've already mentioned one uh finney and others paper on the role of convective heat transfer, and there was also a brilliant work from uh adamowe Eric Milos about convective heat transfer in thin fuel packages.

00:31:27.664 --> 00:31:28.974
I had Eric on the podcast.

00:31:28.974 --> 00:31:29.698
It was brilliant.

00:31:29.698 --> 00:31:33.961
Any other major enablers of what you're able to do right?

00:31:34.020 --> 00:31:36.357
now A lot of the work from NIST, obviously.

00:31:36.357 --> 00:31:37.755
So there's been a lot of work in NIST.

00:31:37.755 --> 00:31:40.318
There's been a lot of work in the US Forest Service.

00:31:40.318 --> 00:31:54.931
There's been a lot of recent work in California because there's been a lot of investment in California From the smoldering perspective, professor Rain's work and a lot of those larger scale experiments that came out of his ERC as well when he had an ERC consolidator grant.

00:31:55.311 --> 00:31:58.160
Those are all fundamental physical parameters that are useful.

00:31:58.160 --> 00:32:11.076
There's a lot of models around Europe, a lot of models in France and the French research groups I am terrible with names, so please don't ask me with names but there's a lot, a lot of modeling work that's been done for a lot of the fundamental aspects.

00:32:11.076 --> 00:32:17.438
And then from a combustion side, yeah, there's a lot of previous work that we have done on heterogeneity in general in our community.

00:32:17.438 --> 00:32:18.821
That, I think, is an enabler.

00:32:18.821 --> 00:32:20.711
You know, without this, you know you asked me.

00:32:20.711 --> 00:32:28.957
We discussed DRCs years ago and for me wildfire was always like a fundamental passion of mine, something I was always interested in research-wise in the last years.

00:32:28.957 --> 00:32:37.983
But the reason I wrote this now is that I couldn't have done this work 10 years before because we didn't have a lot of those physical models and physical understanding.

00:32:37.983 --> 00:32:42.507
We didn't have a lot of the sensitivity in our remote sensing capabilities.

00:32:42.507 --> 00:32:47.413
For example, we didn't have much data on smoldering to flaming transition.

00:32:47.413 --> 00:32:52.854
It was very limited to very particular fuels, again mostly for the built environment and not for the wildlands.

00:32:52.854 --> 00:32:57.063
And so, yeah, I think there's been a lot, a lot of work.

00:32:57.063 --> 00:33:05.319
I mentioned europe and north america, but also in asia, there's been a lot of work in japan on the different fuels and so a lot of those tools have come together.

00:33:05.319 --> 00:33:08.355
That's why I said it took me five years almost of thinking about this idea.

00:33:08.395 --> 00:33:27.077
We started discussing, I remember, 2018, 2019, as you say, but it was sort of bringing together, one, the aspects that already exist and, two, my expertise has changed right, so I could bring in a lot of what I've learned from doing fire for batteries into this, and so a lot of the work I've done on radiation and on fire spread from batteries.

00:33:27.077 --> 00:33:28.958
There's a lot of similarities and applicability.

00:33:28.958 --> 00:33:50.492
So I think I've learned a lot in the past five years that helped me add to this ground to make it doable, because I think the high risk nature you know when you ride an ERC, there always has to be a high risk, but there has to be a feasibility of your scientific approach and the high risk was there five years ago, like it is today, but the feasibility changed as the time progressed because I could try different ideas.

00:33:50.492 --> 00:33:58.699
A lot of that work that Imogen Richards did in her PhD was feasibility trying some of my crazy ideas to see the sensitivity of fuels and so on.

00:33:58.699 --> 00:34:09.715
And so, yeah, I think there's been a lot in the literature, but also there's a lot of work that I've done to sort of give myself a reasonable chance of success right In this project once I've written it At the beginning.

00:34:09.735 --> 00:34:18.222
The high risk I think everyone, as you say, finds a lot of people find wildfires, and uncontrolled wildfires specifically, a very important problem to tackle.

00:34:18.222 --> 00:34:20.833
It's just, yeah, how do we make it feasible?

00:34:21.153 --> 00:34:22.755
I haven't picked on that uncontrolled.

00:34:22.755 --> 00:34:23.958
Can you elaborate?

00:34:24.018 --> 00:34:24.318
on that?

00:34:24.318 --> 00:34:30.235
Yeah, so I say uncontrolled because sometimes we control fire spread so we want fire to start.

00:34:30.235 --> 00:34:42.697
Fire management policy often has controlled fire, so you want things to burn because it frees up areas that could then potentially be fuel sources for very, very large fires, and those fires we know how to predict pretty well.

00:34:42.697 --> 00:34:43.661
The controlled fires.

00:34:43.661 --> 00:34:46.382
Uncontrolled is where we are not controlling.

00:34:46.382 --> 00:34:49.336
There's a lot of other variables that might've accidentally started.

00:34:49.336 --> 00:34:51.798
It might've we might not know all the fuel parameters.

00:34:51.798 --> 00:34:55.297
So control versus uncontrolled for me the definition changes.

00:34:55.297 --> 00:35:00.295
But I call uncontrolled fires the ones that we are not starting and containing intentionally.

00:35:00.690 --> 00:35:10.115
But if not discretized between good and bad fires, because there are uncontrolled fires, like savannah fires, which are essential for the ecosystem and we're not really aiming on suppressing those Absolutely.

00:35:10.155 --> 00:35:14.972
So the purpose of my work is not to decide which fire is a good one and which one is a bad one.

00:35:14.972 --> 00:35:18.891
There's a lot of ecological aspects there that I do not have the expertise to tackle.

00:35:18.891 --> 00:35:23.579
So I think, yeah, between good and bad fires there's a lot of very interesting work.

00:35:23.579 --> 00:35:27.373
It's just it's outside the realm of my expertise so I contain myself to.

00:35:27.373 --> 00:35:31.523
I want to understand the fire spread and the transition for fire spreads.

00:35:31.523 --> 00:35:34.438
I think there's lots of other work to be done on wildfires.

00:35:34.438 --> 00:35:36.429
You know this is one project of five years.

00:35:36.429 --> 00:35:41.081
I think there is enough work from fundamental aspects of wildfires that could take on.

00:35:41.081 --> 00:35:42.753
You know, 50 years worth of projects.

00:35:42.753 --> 00:35:45.498
And the ecological aspects there is very important.

00:35:45.498 --> 00:35:56.409
You want an ecosystem to be balanced, and so sometimes you need in fact, very often you do need fires to ensure that you have new fauna, you have an environment that is suitable for the species that are living there.

00:35:56.969 --> 00:36:16.516
And well, another aspect that is kind of missing and I find it interesting because it's an angle that a lot of people take on wildfire problem, which is the wildfire urban interface, wui as they tend to call it and my automatic translator always collapses when it hears WUI.

00:36:16.516 --> 00:36:19.637
Anyway, there's no WUI in this project.

00:36:19.637 --> 00:36:21.476
It's not human-oriented.

00:36:21.476 --> 00:36:29.242
You don't talk about the human sources of ignition or human-related hazards and how that affects wildfires.

00:36:29.242 --> 00:36:33.773
For you it's just the fundamental combustion fires and that's it.

00:36:33.773 --> 00:36:36.894
No matter if it's started by a human or naturally.

00:36:37.416 --> 00:36:40.085
So for this project the short answer is yes.

00:36:40.085 --> 00:36:52.422
In my research, no, in the sense that you know, Abdullah Rehman is a recent PhD student in my group and he focuses on refires, and so I think there's a lot of aspects there that are very important and we are actually working on that in my group.

00:36:52.422 --> 00:36:56.306
But for here I was more interested in the fundamentals.

00:36:56.306 --> 00:36:57.701
Again, I couldn't tackle everything.

00:36:57.701 --> 00:37:08.197
One of the aspects that I think and I think I even put it in my in my proposal is one of the aspects that fundamentally affects those transitions and those changes are the changes in our environment.

00:37:08.197 --> 00:37:18.976
Right, and so if you have a wildland urban interface versus a pure wildland area, versus a concrete building inside, right, your fire scenario is different because your boundary condition is different.

00:37:18.976 --> 00:37:20.117
So that could be an input.

00:37:20.378 --> 00:37:24.688
But this grant itself was not primarily focused on that aspect, the human aspect.

00:37:24.688 --> 00:37:26.382
I was really interested in the fundamental.

00:37:26.382 --> 00:37:32.280
But again, in my group we do work on this and Abdullah has just started his PhD, so we'll see how it goes.

00:37:32.280 --> 00:37:36.978
He's a month and a half in, so plenty of time to develop his ideas.

00:37:36.978 --> 00:37:41.224
But he's working on wild alabaster face work as part of the Leverhulme Trust Wildfire Center.

00:37:41.525 --> 00:37:42.045
Fantastic.

00:37:42.045 --> 00:37:50.141
I'll now let you summarize in a few sentences where you hope to be in five years after finishing this grant and afterwards.

00:37:50.141 --> 00:38:04.909
I would love to pick your brain because there's a lot of young academics listening to this podcast and obviously that that's a big part of the audience and you achieve the Holy grail for researchers and scholars who are just starting.

00:38:04.909 --> 00:38:19.922
You just got the ERC starting grant, so if I could pick your brain for a few minutes about the route to getting there and let's wrap up the meaty part of the interview and go into coaching session afterwards, are you?

00:38:19.942 --> 00:38:21.625
fine with that, absolutely, if I can help.

00:38:21.625 --> 00:38:22.887
Yes, I mean okay.

00:38:22.887 --> 00:38:26.485
So if I have to summarize my project in five years, where do I want to be?

00:38:26.485 --> 00:38:32.175
Definitely the development of a new prediction tool, or prediction tools, plural, as you said, it might vary.

00:38:32.175 --> 00:38:36.202
I want to train engineers and modelers to adopt to changing scenarios.

00:38:36.202 --> 00:38:46.590
You know this project will have PhD students and postdocs and I want to train them to adapt because then they will bring in future work, hopefully themselves, and they can start new strands.

00:38:47.092 --> 00:38:57.184
And then, from a physics perspective, I really want to say that in five years we have identified distinct driving, heat transfer and chemical mechanism thresholds for varying scales of fire.

00:38:57.184 --> 00:39:00.699
That, I would say, are my sort of top three things in five years.

00:39:00.699 --> 00:39:05.188
And the fourth one is sort of a wishlist for me is engage with you stakeholders.

00:39:05.188 --> 00:39:11.242
You said there's risk maps, there's a lot of operational work being done and I would hope that in five years time I could engage with you.

00:39:11.242 --> 00:39:17.663
You stakeholders say look, this is the fundamental work we've done, this is a tool, can this be implemented, can this be used?

00:39:17.974 --> 00:39:18.996
I would say those are the four.

00:39:18.996 --> 00:39:23.882
If I have to say four things, those are the four things that I want, if you ask me, in 10 years.

00:39:23.882 --> 00:39:29.750
I would hope this work because this is a five-year project, but I would hope this work in 10 years time would have hopefully started.

00:39:29.750 --> 00:39:40.039
I would say being able to have a holistic predictive fire model based on identifiable fuel landscape that gives you real-time risk prediction and fuel management.

00:39:40.039 --> 00:39:40.840
But that's in 10 years, I would say.

00:39:40.840 --> 00:39:47.829
I would say the five years are the fourth point I gave you, but I would hope in the field in 10 years we are at that real time risk prediction and field management.

00:39:55.195 --> 00:39:57.518
Brilliant and I will be monitoring that closely and follow up with you very often on that.

00:39:57.518 --> 00:40:05.510
So let's talk about the journey to ERC because, as I said, there's multiple young researchers listening to this podcast not only young, but, like ERC, is open to anyone and everyone.

00:40:05.510 --> 00:40:09.097
In academia, there are those few holy grails you can get in academia.

00:40:09.097 --> 00:40:16.385
You know full professorship and the ERC grants I would say are also kind of a holy grail.

00:40:16.385 --> 00:40:18.708
When did it really start?

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When did you decide this is something to pursue and how much of your efforts was to optimize for this?

00:40:28.568 --> 00:40:37.731
Because I've been on the journey as well and I know that C-Grant is not something you wake up on a Sunday morning and you start writing on a Monday.

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It's a process.

00:40:38.755 --> 00:40:42.804
So what was the time horizon for this?

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for you.

00:40:43.505 --> 00:40:44.876
I think it changes person by person.

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I can tell you my experience.

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So my experience is I think there's always a little bit of luck.

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So you know, I'm very, very fortunate, I'm very lucky to have this grant.

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But my experience was I started my independent academic career five, six, six years ago and I had a very supportive mentor, my PhD supervisor, guillermo Reyn, who encouraged me to sort of think about my own ideas and not just the projects I was working on.

00:41:06.391 --> 00:41:08.559
And I was thinking of other ideas and other projects.

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But as I kept on doing my work and writing proposals because as an academic you need proposals to fund your group, right, you need funding to hire PhD students and postdocs my work was sort of moving more and more in the battery direction and I was learning lots of new skills.

00:41:22.407 --> 00:41:33.119
But I still had this fundamental question that I mentioned at the start about wildfires, because again, it's a problem that affects my area of the world in Italy as well, and I was very interested.

00:41:33.119 --> 00:41:37.340
So I was reading up on papers in the area and I had started a PhD student in the area.

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In fact, my first PhD student at King's was on wildfires and not on batteries, because it was an area I really wanted to grow in, where I didn't have funding but I wanted to learn more, and so it was a learning process for me.

00:41:49.422 --> 00:41:59.978
And then it was iterative in the sense that I wrote my first proposal, not for ERC I always had in the back of my mind ERC but I wrote some funding proposals in the UK and they didn't get funded.

00:41:59.978 --> 00:42:07.260
But I got some feedback right and so it was a feedback mechanism of this is an idea.

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It was for smaller projects, like two-year projects or three-year projects, and then I wrote a seven-year project, one and I had to write a short summary of it to see if I would be selected for the next stages, and that's where I sort of spent a long time two page on where do I want to be in seven years, and this was something that kept coming up.

00:42:19.659 --> 00:42:21.860

177 - Physics-Based Modelling of Fire Spread with Francesco Restuccia

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