Department of Fire Protection Engineering at WPI

This is an official account for the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI)

[Department of Fire Protection Engineering at WPI @fpewpi]

Conclusion:
We concluded areas susceptible to wildfires may benefit from clearing grass and other brush from properties. Additionally, building in areas with flat ground would help in slowing fire spread.

[Department of Fire Protection Engineering at WPI @fpewpi]

In FP 4000 - Fire Lab, 4 student groups explored parameters that impact structure ignition in Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Fires by designing their own experiment and writing a lab report as a twitter thread. Group 4:

[Department of Fire Protection Engineering at WPI @fpewpi]

Discussion:
The grass between the houses was the most important variable. It was the most effective way to prevent fire spread. During trials without grass, the fire didn’t spread to the houses. Moisture and slope affected the fire spread rate, but did not prevent fire spread.

[Department of Fire Protection Engineering at WPI @fpewpi]

Conclusions:
After testing the effects of the ground mixture and foliage on flame spread, we found that having foliage had a large effect on fire spread and having sand instead of soil also increased the spread of the flame

[Department of Fire Protection Engineering at WPI @fpewpi]

In FP 4000 - Fire Lab, 4 student groups explored parameters that impact structure ignition in Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Fires by designing their own experiment and writing a lab report as a twitter thread. Group 3:

[Department of Fire Protection Engineering at WPI @fpewpi]

Discussion:
We found that sand environments with and without vegetation reached higher temperatures than soil ones. Tests without vegetation also showed lower temperatures at further distances because the fire did not spread to houses 2 and 3.