Fire Science

This textbook provides students and academics with a conceptual understanding of fire behavior and fire effects on people and ecosystems to support effective integrated fire management. Through case studies, interactive spreadsheets programmed with equations and graphics, and clear explanations, the book provides undergraduate, graduate, and professional readers with a straightforward learning path. The authors draw from years of experience in successfully teaching fundamental concepts and applications, synthesizing cutting-edge science, and applying lessons learned from fire practitioners. We discuss fire as part of environmental and human health. Our process-based, comprehensive, and quantitative approach encompasses combustion and heat transfer, and fire effects on people, plants, soils, and animals in forest, grassland, and woodland ecosystems from around the Earth. Case studies and examples link fundamental concepts to local, landscape, and global fire implications, including social-ecological systems. Globally, fire science and integrated fire management have made major strides in the last few decades. Society faces numerous fire-related challenges, including the increasing occurrence of large fires that threaten people and property, smoke that poses a health hazard, and lengthening fire seasons worldwide. Fires are useful to suppress fires, conserve wildlife and habitat, enhance livestock grazing, manage fuels, and in ecological restoration. Understanding fire science is critical to forecasting the implication of global change for fires and their effects. Increasing the positive effects of fire (fuels reduction, enhanced habitat for many plants and animals, ecosystem services increased) while reducing the negative impacts of fires (loss of human lives, smoke and carbon emissions that threaten health, etc.) is part of making fires good servants rather than bad masters.

This book focuses on topics in the entire spectrum of fire safety science, targeting research in fires, explosions, combustion science, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, risk analysis, structural engineering, and other subjects. The book contributes to a gain in advanced scientific knowledge and presents or advances new ideas in all topics in fire safety science. Two decades ago, the 1st Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology was held in Hefei, China. Since then, the Asia-Oceania Symposia have grown in size and quality. This book, reflecting that growth, helps readers to understand fire safety technology, design, and methodology in diverse areas including historical buildings, photovoltaic panels, batteries, and electric vehicles.

This book features selected papers from the 11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (AOSFST 2018), held in Taipei, Taiwan. Covering the entire spectrum of fire safety science, it focuses on research on fires, explosions, combustion science, heat transfer, fluid dynamics, risk analysis and structural engineering, as well as other topics. Presenting advanced scientific insights, the book introduces and advances new ideas in all areas of fire safety science. As such it is a valuable resource for academic researchers, fire safety engineers, and regulators of fire, construction and safety authorities. Further it provides new ideas for more efficient fire protection.

Americans have long been suspicious of experts and elites. This new history explains why so many have believed that science has the power to corrupt American culture. Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that “tenured radicals” have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science’s celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions—and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers. Science under Fire reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation’s bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s. Looking at today’s battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists’ claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths.