The Needed Fire Science

Since there have been many review articles on many aspects of Fire Science and its applications (1-10), this paper will stress the many aspects of Fire Science not yet complete or in some cases not even started. By now (1985), it has become broadly accepted that the way of the future in Fire Engineering is through various levels of modeling, aided by the modern computer. A number of models exist for various aspects of a fire in an enclosure (11-14) the most advanced of which are gradually becoming sufficiently general (15-21) to include a fire in any of man's structures. These include both zone and field mOdels. At the same time the U.S. Forest Service has developed a fire model sufficiently accurate to have been incorporated into a special hand held calculator usable in the field (22).