Thrust Areas

Fire Research

Unwanted fires or unexpected fire incidents, ranging from the deliberate "torching" of property by protesting mobs or a natural disaster that results in casualties are a growing concern. Day by day, the use of flammable plastic materials increase while the traditional building materials such as metal, wood, stone, cotton and wool are being replaced. As a result, the risk of fire accidents has doubled with time. With the advancement in research, however, the addition of fire retardants have played a crucial role in reducing a material’s flammability.

In the field of Fire Engineering, research is done extensively in the areas of pool fire behaviour, analysis and modeling of foam and DCP based fire extinguishment processes, test-fire emission reduction strategies and simulation of fire and smoke transport in a built environment.

    Research work in the area of pool fire heat feedback, fire simulations and fire suppression has a wide scope in future.

    A Porous Wall Concept for preventing ambient disturbance during pool fire testing has been conceived and implemented successfully, thus, bringing down the cost of expensive types of equipment normally used for the same purpose.

    A fire test facility for BARC where nuclear transportation packages are tested in a 4m X 4m diesel- floated-on-water pool fire has been established. These 30 m duration fire tests are instrumented to obtain diesel burn rate data through a 60 thermocouple rake and Diesel layer pressure history during the burn duration using a submerged independent pressure sensor capsule. Additionally, in situ measurement of package weight loss during fire test is also obtained which is expected to contribute to the cask design significantly. Test results documentation and analysis will contribute to frontier research in the area of diesel pool fire combustion.

Combustion

One of FCRC’s focus areas is biomass combustion which includes the development and testing of biomass stoves for a better efficiency and emissions, stove technology dissemination, municipal solid waste combustion and boron production.

    Combustion research activities in collaboration with IISc have resulted in the development and patenting of clean biomass combustion devices. Clean combustion stove technology developed at FCRC, Jain University is transferred to FEPL and Phoneix products Belgaum.