|
Abstract
|
Mastery of fire is intimately linked to advances in human civilization, culture and technology. It is also a key component of renewal and regeneration of natural ecosystems. At the same time fire continues to be a threat to lives, property and the environment. Our complex relationship with fire has been the impetus for many innovations in direct and remote sensing of key properties of fires including flame, heat and smoke. This Special Issue on fire and smoke detection and monitoring has curated and collected the latest research on sensors and systems to detect and quantify wildland, structural, and industrial combustion, and the emissions of smoke produced.
Public interest surrounds detecting and monitoring fire and smoke behavior for fire protection and suppression in residential and industrial settings, or for the design and test of safer materials and structures. The time lag required to detect smoke in a building fire is a key factor in the likelihood of harm to occupants. Jang and Hwang [1] carefully controlled smoke velocity and concentration to measure obscuration thresholds for different detectors with different fuels. They found that sensitivity of photo-electric and ionization sensors depended on the type of fuel. The results will be useful to predict detector activation times and determine the required safe egress time.
The majority of the papers concentrated on wildland fires. This is likely due to a combination of a large number of concerted research programs and recent advances, combined with increased public interest. The devastation from the recent wildfires in California, Australia, and elsewhere has captured the attention of the public, government officials and funding agencies and highlighted the need to detect and monitor wildfires to protect and preserve life and property. Image-based remote sensing from the air and space across different wavelength regions has revolutionized the monitoring and management of wildfires (for review see [2]). Barmpoutis and colleagues [3] review the current state-of-the-art in optical remote fire detection systems from terrestrial, airborne or space platforms and present a bibliometric analysis of the literature in addition to their review.
Recent advances in low resource detector technology and the rise in the availability of data from small satellites has seen a surge in innovative detector technologies and in the applications to which such data are put. Dufour and colleagues [4] present an innovative sensor system for measurements of biomass burning. The system is based on a bi-spectral microbolometer that can make radiometric measurements at long- and mid-wavelength IR. Such a system would enable low-resource sensor platforms such as nanosats or small UAVs for wildfire monitoring. Johnston et al. [5] detail the system features and performance requirements for a wildfire monitoring satellite in the context of the WildFireSat mission. The user-centric systems approach illustrates the complex interplay of observational, measurement and precision requirements for a successful and useful system.
Progress depends on the ability to extract meaningful information from the sensor systems, and many papers focused on processing of the sensor data to extract meaningful fire characteristics...
Language: en |