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Overview

After exploring our website or seeing one of the hundreds of news articles on wildfires, you might ask how you can learn more? What fire science or fire protection engineering is? And is there a career in it? Well, here we would like to give you a little introduction into the basics of Fire Protection Engineering and Fire Science. These resources have been compiled to answer common questions and are intended to give you an insight into the field from the basics to advanced topics. But if you are curious about more feel free to reach out to us on twitter (@gollnerfire or @FranzHRichter) or E-mail (mgollner@berkeley.edu or franz.richter@berkeley.edu).

Let’s get started. What is a fire engineer? Check out this great video by Arup on fire protection engineering:

and this video by the University of Edinburgh

Also see this great website (click here) by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, short SFPE, which accompanies a lecture style course on YouTube on fire science which can be found here.

Now we know what a fire engineer is, but what is a fire and a flame? Check out this great explanation by Prof Feymann on what fire is fundamentally:

Also check out this book on burning of a candle by Faraday who explained all major concepts of a flame in a relatively easy way.

Faraday_1860_History_Candle

Find the writing a bit too old school? Then head over to the engineerguy who made a series of YouTube videos on the book and a modernized version (just click here)

Now you have learned all the basics, check out some of the contemporary researchers explaining their work to the public. First up we have Prof Rein from Imperial College who demonstrates that solids can burn without a flame (they smoulder) and these smouldering fires are causing huge devastation across the globe. To skip the introduction, go straight to minute 2.20.

Next up we have Prof Torero from University College London, who gave a talk back in 2010 linking the fundamental science of fire to the fire safety in buildings and space stations. To skip the introduction, go straight to minute 3.20.

Both Prof Torero and Prof Rein received their PhD here at UC Berkeley in Mechanical Engineering. Still interested in more? Well, fundamentally a flame is a complex interplay of fluid mechanics (that is how gases and liquids move), heat transfer (that is how temperatures change), and chemistry (that is how molecules rearrange). There are many courses on fluid mechanics online for all levels, and we will list only a couple of introductory courses here. The first is an amazing, but old course, by MIT (here) that gives you a great visual introduction, even if the mathematics might be still a bit confusing if you have not studied differential equations before.

If you want a slightly slower introduction into fluids check out Khan Academy (here) or this crash course by Dr. Shini Somara (here). The second topic one has to understand to study fire protection engineering is heat transfer. Luckily Dr Shini Somara has made a crash course for that as well (click here)

Alternatively there is a course on Thermodynamics, of which heat transfer is a sub-topic, by the University of Michigan which gives you a full college level introduction (here). The third topic we need to understand is the chemical kinetics of a flame and again for that topic there is crash course (full chemistry course here):

Still want to know more about Fire Protection Engineering? Start a full online course on Fire Protection Engineering here:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/fire-effect#about

Still here? Try to simulate some fire yourself with the Fire Dynamics Simulator. There is a great introduction into the program here

Okay that was it for an Introduction to Fire Protection Engineering. But even after years of learning there are a lot of advanced college level lectures online. For example, check out this lecture on fire dynamics for college students by Prof Guillermo Rein

https://tinyurl.com/fire-dynamics-rein

or this lecture series for PhD students by Prof Jose Torero

This was just a short overview of all the material available to learn about fire science and fire protection engineering. However, there are many more movies, Ted talks, documentaries, and lectures available online. To learn more about them check out our repository below.

 

Think something is missing? Please E-mail me with your suggestions at franz.richter@berkeley.edu.

Page created by Dr Franz Richter, UC Berkeley.