EAGER: Advancing Flame Spread Analysis by Temperature-Sensitive Paints

Summary

This project introduces a new optical technique using temperature-sensitive paints to measure rapid heating during flame spread across solid materials, aiming to improve fire safety and spacecraft design.

What they want

The technical goal is to establish whether temperature-sensitive paints can serve as a fast, non-intrusive diagnostic for quantifying thermal processes controlling flame spread in solid fuels under opposed forced flow. The research will develop and characterize a new class of chemically compatible coatings capable of resolving rapid temperature changes, heat-flux variations, and the spatial extent of the preheated zone immediately ahead of the flame front. Controlled combustion experiments will be conducted in a flow-regulated chamber using plastic slabs coated with paint made with the same material across multiple orientations. High-speed optical measurements will be integrated with analytical modeling and Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations to validate fuel pyrolysis submodels, assess radiative and convective heat-transfer contributions, and reconstruct quantities that cannot be directly measured.

Deliverables

First proof-of-concept for the optical technique
New class of chemically compatible coatings
Resulting dataset for predictive modeling of flame spread

Technical requirements

Temperature-sensitive paints made from the same material as the burning sample
Optical technique for capturing fast, precise temperature changes
Chemically compatible coatings capable of resolving rapid temperature changes, heat-flux variations, and spatial extent of preheated zone
Flow-regulated chamber for controlled combustion experiments
High-speed optical measurements
Analytical modeling
Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations

How they evaluate

Intellectual merit
Broader impacts review criteria