AI Improves and Accelerates Fire Simulation
March 2024
Fire modelling is widely known as very slow and not so accurate and realistic because it is challenging to simulate the burning process of solid/liquid fuel. Resolving the heat transfer between flame and condensed fuel requires tiny cells, making simulation solve and expensive. We use AI + fire image to predict the interface heat transfer so the burning process can be solved under larger cells. This work is published in Engineering Applications of Computational Fluid Mechanics, led by Caiyi Xiong and Zilong Wang.
PolyU Fire @ Battery Safety Conference
March 2024
Xinyan and Lei attended the 5th National Meeting on Lithium-ion Battery Safety in Beijing, organized by Tsinghua University. Xinyan was invited to give a talk titled Exploring the Limiting Cooling to Prevent Battery Thermal Runaway, which was the latest research from Lei Zhang’s PhD thesis. The talk receives positive feedbacks from both academia and the battery industry.
New paper on Laser Ignition of Battery
March 2024
Laser, as an excellent remote and spot heating source, can heat the battery and trigger the thermal runaways in a well-controlled way, which is particularly good for scientific research. Our latest paper quantifies the limiting conditions and heating efficiency of laser heating of a cylindrical battery, so it is valuable to make battery test standards. This work is published in the Journal of Energy Storage, led by Yanhui and Lei.
PolyU Fire Cycling
March 2024
PolyU Fire Lab organized a cycling event from Tai Wai to Tai Mei Tuk (~20km). We spend a lot of time sitting in front of the computer, so we should spend more time exercising and maintaining a healthy lifestyle! This is also a farewell event for Jakub before he flies back to Poland.
Digital Twin for Tunnel Fire
Feb 2024
High traffic flow in a confined tunnel makes fire safety a critical issue. This paper proposed a digital twin framework for tunnel fire safety management in real-time, driven by dynamic sensor data and AIoT technologies. The AI model is integrated into a 3D digital twin platform developed by the game engine Unity 3D. This work is part of the SureFire project led by Xiaoning Zhang and Yishuo Jiang from HKU. It is now open access in Developments in the Built Environment.
Xinyan got FCE Outstanding Young Teacher Award
Feb 2024
Dr Xinyan Huang receives the FCE Faculty Award for Outstanding Young Teacher. In total, only eight young professors are awarded this year. Dr Huang’s passion for teaching, combined with his profound expertise, has not only enriched the academic journey of his students but has also contributed significantly to advancements in Fire Safety Engineering.
Xinyan is Featured in Local Newspaper
Feb 2024
Dr Xinyan Huang was interviewed by Wen Wei Po (Chinese Newspaper funded in 1948) and featured on the whole page of the Newspaper as part of a Serial on Scientific Disaster Reduction. It introduces the latest research from PolyU Fire Lab, including the firefighting robot, fire suppression by air vortex ring, SureFire Smart Firefighting system, smoldering fire in peatland. The online version of this special report includes more details and video demonstrations.
FireDM: Generating Unlimited Fire Images
Feb 2024
One of the major issues in AI-driven fire detection and quantification is the lack of a good fire segmentation database. Our FireDM takes full advantage of the combined strengths of a combination of pre-trained diffusion models and text-guided diffusion using ChatGPT4-Fire to generate multi-scale and detail-rich fire images. Then, we use FireDM to create the world’s first high-quality fire segmentation dataset. This work is published in Knowledge-Based Systems, led by Hongtao Zheng.
New Book on Smart Firefighting
Feb 2024
Dr Xinyan Huang and Dr Andy Tam from NIST co-edited a book titled Intelligent Building Fire Safety and Smart Firefighting, published by Springer. This book includes 20 chapters and introduces the latest developments in Intelligent Fire Safety Design, Advanced Fire Identification, and Smart Firefighting Operations. This is the first book dedicated to the new concept of Smart Firefighting.
Review of Fire Smoke Model in Building Award
Jan 2024
Since the 1970s, researchers have developed semi-empirical models to describe fire smoke movement inside buildings, but there are three major issues. This paper depicts the cases encountered during the design over the past decades and provides detailed processes for solving these issues. This work was published in Emergency Management Science and Technology, led by Dr Mingchun Luo. It is a summary of Dr Luo’s years of research and practices in the fire engineering consultancy.
Ho Yin is Featured in HK TV Program
Jan 2024
Ho Yin and his start-up company, GABES, are interviewed by the HOY Seiral Program (Smart Future Technology, Episode 21) for their latest development of intelligent dynamics exit signs. Ho Yin has been conducting this research at PolyU since 2021, and later, he formed a start-up to commericalize this new technology and aim to improve life safety in a fire evacuation. So far, Ho Yin has received investments and angel funds of over 2 million.
See How Firework Ignite a Building Façade
Jan 2024
Every holiday, there will be massive fire incidents caused by fireworks. In our experiment, we drop a hot steel spherical particle (6-16 mm and 800-1200 °C) onto the low-density expandable polystyrene (EPS) foam to simulate the spotting ignition process. We found three different ignition behaviors under various wind speeds. This work enhances the comprehension of complex interactions between flash points and fire points in the spotting or hot-particle ignition of the building facades.
Effect of Fuel Type on Smoldering LOC
Jan 2024
Oxygen supply is a key parameter of smouldering and is sensitive to fuel density and particle size. We explore the oxygen threshold for smouldering propagation under upward internal airflow velocities for pine needles with different bulk densities and wood samples with different particle sizes. This work advances the fundamental understanding of smouldering on solid fuel particles and their smouldering fire risks. This work is published in Combustion and Flame as a part of Yunzhu’s PhD thesis.
Xiaoning Zhang Passed PhD Thesis Defense
Jan 2024
Xiaoning has successfully defended his PhD thesis, Smart Tunnel Fire Forecast and Safety Management Driven by Artificial Intelligence of Things, which is rated as Excellent. His thesis examiners are Prof. Long SHI from USTC and Dr Håkan Frantzich from Lund University. His supervisor team includes Dr Xinyan Huang (Chief Supervisor) and co-supervisors (Prof. Fu Xiao, Prof. Heng Li, and Dr Xiqiang Wu). Congratulations, Dr Zhang!
Can UG Smoldering Fire Trigger a Flame?
Jan 2024
This work explores whether such underground peat fires can resurface to the ground and ignite a flame on the litter layer. With lab-scale and field experiments, we found the threshold of such surface flaming to be a function of temperature and temperature increase rate at the interface between peat and litter. This work was led by Yichao Zhang in collaboration with Inner Mongolia Agricultural University and published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire with open access.