Project description
New tools for fire investigators
The charring rate of wood is key for fire investigations. For instance, a slow burning, smouldering fire will show a graduation in the depth of charring, but a fast burning, intense fire will show severe charring on exposed surfaces. Information about the rate of charring and the depth of the char may be combined to determine the origin of the fire and the burn time. The EU-funded FORCHAR project has developed a quantitative method that measures the light reflected from charcoals to calculate the degree of charring. This new tool will be validated by real-world testing at fire scene investigations.
Objective
Fire Investigations are undertaken to determine the origin and cause of fires in housing or commercial properties, to identify whether there may be a need for criminal investigation, to provide information on financial loss and in the case of loss of life to design protocols to protect society. Charring is one of the most obvious products of fire and fire investigators have long attempted to utilise patterns of charring to determine fire origin and cause. However, these have often had to rely on qualitative descriptions of charring as there is no quantitative tool that allows them to measure the degree of charring of wood materials. My ERC StG developed a quantitative method that allows the amount of light reflected from charcoals to be measured toward estimating wildfire behaviour. In FORCHAR (forensic char) I aim to adapt this approach and develop it into an essential tool for use in the fire investigator’s forensic toolkit. Its strength is that it allows quantitative measurements of char properties to be used to interpret the origin and source of fires. The FORCHAR tool will be taken through a series of phases of validation testing to that 1) will provide proof of concept that the approach can be transferred from wildfires to fires in the built environment, 2) will allow real-world testing where FORCHAR will be utilised in real fire scene investigations via collaborations with industry partners. The aim being to develop a new tool that can be used to improving fire safety protocols toward preventing the loss of life.
Fields of science
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-POC - Proof of Concept GrantHost institution
EX4 4QJ Exeter
United Kingdom