Thesis (M.A.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2008. / Description based on title page of source document ( viewed on April 23, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-100).

Proefschrift--Utrecht. / Summary in French. Stellingen: [3] p. inserted. Bibliography: p. 115-119.

Forest fires has become an increasing threat all over the world. Pollution and rising greenhouse gases has led to an ever increase in global temperatures. Sweden has previously been spared from larger fires, but in the past few year it has been been made clear that these climate changes will affect the number and intensity of forest fires.  In this project I have investigated how forest fires work and how the process of  extinguishing them looks today. With a focus on the personal equipment I have looked into how to improve the working environment and the safety for fire-fighters. Using the design process this problem is tackled from a holistic point of view, looking at both the users and context. The solutions presented in this project is a professional safety product called “Phoenix. PPe Wildfire respirator”. A lightweight portable oxygen harness with an attached emergency mask.

This thesis deals with solution of steel members under fire conditions. The goal of the thesis is to examine and compare unprotected steel members with steel members protected by different types of passive protection. Calculation is performed according to applicable design standards. ANSYS software is used for thermal and structural analysis.

The mechanism of flame propagation in fuel beds of wildland fires is important to understand and quantify fire spread rates. Fires spread by radiative and convective heating and often require direct flame contact to achieve ignition. The flame interface in an advancing fire is unsteady and turbulent, making study of intermittent flames in complex fuels difficult. This thesis applies the one-dimensional turbulence (ODT) model to a study of flame propagation by simulating a lab-scale fire representative of the flame interface in a fuel bed and incorporating solid fuel particles into the ODT code. The ODT model is able to resolve individual flames (a unique property of this model) and provide realistic turbulent statistics. ODT solves diffusion-reaction equations on a line-of-sight that is advanced either in time or in one spatial direction (perpendicular to the line-of-sight). Turbulent advection is modeled through stochastic domain mapping processes. A vertical wall fire, in which ethylene fuel is slowly fed through a porous ceramic, is modeled to investigate an unsteady turbulent flame front in a controlled environment. Simulations of this configuration are performed using a spatial formulation of the ODT model, where the ODT line is perpendicular to the wall and is advanced up the wall. Simulations include radiation and soot effects and are compared to experimental temperature data taken over a range of fuel flow rates. Flame structure, velocities, and temperature statistics are reported. The ODT model is shown to capture the evolution of the flame and describe the intermittent properties at the flame edge, though temperature fluctuations are somewhat over predicted. A solid particle devolatilization model was included in the ODT code to study the convective heating of unburnt solid fuels through direct flame contact. Here the particles are treated as sweet gum hardwood and a single-reaction, first order decomposition model is used to simulate the devolatilization rates. Only preliminary results were presented for a simple case, but this extension of the ODT model presents new opportunities for future research.

Thesis advisor: Penelope Ismay / This dissertation traces the changing distributions of social responsibility for fire in Calcutta and London across the long-nineteenth century. While these two cities were the capitals of the British Empire, with similar adoptions of municipal fire brigades, the public trust systems that undergirded these institutions varied greatly, revealing how municipal fire protection required more than municipal authority and technological innovation to be effective and acceptable to urban citizens. This dissertation examines how these cities endeavored to limit the fire danger that went hand in hand with imperial economic growth and in the process created systems by which the social responsibility for fire was divided between urban citizens and newly-instituted municipal fire brigades. Specifically, I ask how did the British Empire approach the destructive force of fire as a social problem in the rapidly modernizing urban environments of the nineteenth century? Other historians have argued that growing municipal authority or technological innovation in the name of efficiency account for the changes in nineteenth-century fire protection, but this dissertation argues instead that expanded municipal control, adopting new technologies, and the creation of municipal firefighting institutions were all a response to breakdowns in trust. Solving the fire problem could not be entirely top-down, nor completely bottom-up, but required a trusting relationship between urban citizens and municipal governments that was rare in the nineteenth-century British Empire. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

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