Collaborative Research: FIRE-WUI: Investigating Fire Behavior-Emission Relationships for Building Materials

Wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires, where wildfires spread into communities, are becoming more frequent and destructive as urban expansion increases the number of homes exposed to wildfires. In addition to burning vegetation, these fires consume human-made building materials, releasing complex mixtures of smoke that contain toxic pollutants not typically produced by natural wildfires. These emissions can degrade air quality, threaten public health, and complicate emergency response and recovery. However, current air quality models and emission inventories do not adequately represent smoke from burning buildings, limiting the ability of public agencies to predict smoke impacts and protect communities. This project will provide the scientific foundation needed to better characterize these emissions and improve air quality assessments during WUI fires. The research will also support the education and training of graduate students through interdisciplinary collaboration in environmental engineering, fire protection engineering, and building science, as well as engaging K–12 students through outreach activities. This project will systematically investigate emissions from the combustion of building materials using experiments conducted across bench-, medium-, and large-scale combustion facilities. Both individual construction materials and scaled building models designed according to modern building codes will be burned to quantify aerosol and gas-phase emissions together with key fire behavior parameters. Advanced analytical instrumentation will be used to characterize emission factors, chemical composition, and physical properties under a range of combustion conditions. The study will establish quantitative relationships between fire behavior and emissions, evaluate whether emissions from complex structures can be predicted by summing emissions from individual building materials, and determine how emission characteristics vary across combustion scales. The findings will improve understanding of the combustion chemistry of human-made fuels during WUI fires, update emission inventories, and support the development of fire behavior-informed air quality models that more accurately predict the environmental and public health impacts of WUI fires. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.