Combustion science for safety

This paper presents a review of combustion studies for the promotion of safety against fires and accidental explosions. Much research relevant to mitigating losses caused by these combustion-induced disasters has been performed in the history of combustion science. Since most combustion studies can be useful for the promotion of safety with respect to combustion-induced disasters, it is not easy to distinguish research on fire or explosion safety from other combustion studies. The purpose of the investigation is the key to such a classification. Resulting topics in this category include ignition, flame spread, mass burning, compartment fires, flame propagation, detonations, dust explosions, and vented gas explosions under various conditions. Brief surveys and some notable results of studies on each of these topics are presented. The experimental arrangements and theoretical formulations, as well as diagnostics adopted in the studies for revealing unknown phenomena thought to occur, seem in general to be crude and primitive in comparison with other combustion research. However, those studies have resulted in novel findings, which have contributed to the advancement of combustion science, and they have revealed a number of key facts, which have led us to new fields of combustion science. Among the numerous important facts found through those studies, one that is emphasized in this paper, is that the combustion phenomena in fires and explosions are not simple. They depend strongly on How fields.