203 - The lessons from repeating Jin's experiment on visibility in smoke

Fire Science Show

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7d ago 42:30

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I've finally done it. We've repeated Jin's experiment! I thought I knew-it-all about that experiment, but boy... knowing and doing it are two different things. I can say, I've finally cleared my mind on some thoughts after this, which I am finally happy to share with all of you!

First things first, massive thanks to my partner in crime Wai-Kit Wilson Cheung, from the group of prof. Xinyan Huang, who was the man on the ground doing the experiments with me. Together we went further into this model, than ever before.
The revelations are far-reaching. We found that Jin used extraordinary lighting conditions—180 lux background brightness and impossibly bright signage—far from realistic building emergency conditions. Background brightness emerges as perhaps the most critical factor in determining what can be seen through smoke, with dramatic differences between light-emitting and light-reflecting signs. Most significantly, the experiment's careful constraint of sign size (using proportionally larger signs at greater distances) created elegant mathematics but removed a crucial real-world variable from the model.
These insights have profound implications. Engineers likely overestimate visibility in many scenarios, particularly with reflective signage. The widely used K-values (3 for reflective signs, 8 for light-emitting signs) appear reasonably conservative for typical building conditions, though higher values might be warranted in darker environments. Most provocatively, simply increasing sign size would almost certainly improve evacuation safety, yet our current models provide no mechanism to quantify this benefit.
Fire safety practitioners will find this episode transformative, offering both practical guidance and theoretical understanding. Should we stick with visibility distance or shift to smoke density as our primary metric? How can we balance lighting conditions to optimize visibility of both obstacles and signage? And most critically, how might next-generation visibility models better serve real-world building safety? These are things we currently work on.

If you look for reading, check the paper on the extinction coefficient by the German colleagues: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16182

If you strive for more podcast episodes:

this one covers historical Jin's experiment: https://www.firescienceshow.com/162-experiments-that-changed-fire-science-pt-9-jins-experiment-on-visibility-in-smoke/
this one is on soot and smoke: https://www.firescienceshow.com/163-fire-fundamentals-pt-11-soot-in-fire-safety-engineering/
and this one our general thoughts about modelling visibility and new pathways we see forward: https://www.firescienceshow.com/030-visibility-prediction-framework-with-lukas-arnold/

The research was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, based on a contract for the implementation and financing of a research project OPUS LAP No 2020/39/I/ST8/03159 and by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under the project number 465392452, for the joint project: “Visibility Prediction Framework – a next-generation model for visibility in smoke in built environment”.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Chapters

1. Introduction to Visibility in Smoke (00:00:00)

2. What is Visibility in Smoke? (00:03:52)

3. Jin's Historical Experiments Explained (00:08:36)

4. Repeating Jin's Experiments Today (00:15:37)

5. Background Brightness: A Critical Variable (00:21:40)

6. Sign Size: The Overlooked Factor (00:25:30)

7. Light Reflecting vs Emitting Signs (00:31:42)

8. Engineering Implications and Future Research (00:39:38)

9. Conclusions and Design Considerations (00:42:05)

212 episodes

#Science #Tech #Physics #Wojciech Wegrzynski #Fire #Smoking #Wildfires #Cfd #Safety #Risk #Civil Engineering