Sponsors

Liu Naian, State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, China

 

Short Biography: Prof. Naian Liu is a professor and the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). His research area focuses on wildland fire dynamics, including the topics of extreme fire behavior, wildfire spread, pyrolysis, and material flammability. He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers and delivered 21 invited speeches. Among these, 45 papers have been published in Proc. Combust. Inst. and Combust. Flame. In 2023, he was elected Chair of both the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) and the International FORUM of Fire Research Directors. He was also elected a Fellow of the Combustion Institute in 2018. Prof. Liu serves on many international organizations, journals, and conferences of the fire safety community. He serves as Associate Editor of Proceedings of the Combustion Institute (2026–), Associate Editor of International Journal of Wildland Fire (2016–), Associate Editor of Fire Technology (2016–), and Editorial Board Member of Applications in Energy and Combustion Science (2019–). He served as the Leader Chair for the topic “Wildland fires” of the 11th (2014) and 12th (2017) International Symposium on Fire Safety Science (IAFSS Symposium), and Chair for the Poster Session of the 12th IAFSS Symposium. He served as the Program Scientific Co-chair of the 13th IAFSS Symposium and Symposium Planning Committee Co-Chair of the 14th IAFSS Symposium.

 

Short Summary: The high-intensity burning behaviors in wildland fires stem from the significant interaction of combustion with heat transfer and atmospheric flow under complicated fuel, meteorology, and topography conditions. Research over the past several decades has resulted in incrementally enhanced insights into the mechanism transformations of combustion dynamics underlying the various behaviors in wildland fires, with theories and models developed and validated. These advances are expected to improve the efficiency of fire spread predictions significantly. This lecture intends to make a comprehensive review of the research on the behavior and mechanism transformation in wildland fires. We will first discuss the transformation and physical modeling of firelines with wind effect under continuous and discrete fuel bed conditions. Then, the transformation of fuel preheating mechanisms in upslope and canyon terrains that determines the complicated transformation of firelines, will be discussed. Subsequently, we will provide an overview of the role of extreme fire behaviors such as eruptive fire, spot fire and fire whirl in fire spread. Finally, the challenges in modeling and predicting fire spread posed by the behavior and mechanism transformations will be summarized, with some discussions and open questions.