EAGER: Advancing Flame Spread Analysis by Temperature-Sensitive Paints

This project addresses a long‑standing challenge in fire science: understanding how flames spread across solid materials, a process that influences everything from everyday fire safety to spacecraft design. Current tools cannot reliably measure the rapid heating that occurs just before a material ignites, which limits the ability to predict and prevent dangerous flame‑spread scenarios. This project introduces a new optical technique that uses temperature‑sensitive paints made from the same material as the burning sample, which will allow researchers to capture fast, precise temperature changes without disturbing the flame. By providing the first proof‑of‑concept for this approach, the project could open the door to safer materials, improved fire‑resistant designs, and better models for extreme environments such as microgravity. The work will strengthen fire‑safety research, will train students in advanced diagnostics, and will expand scientific capability at the University of Hawaii. The technical goal is to establish whether temperature‑sensitive paints can serve as a fast, non‑intrusive diagnostic for quantifying the thermal processes that control 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, enabling systematic evaluation of flame‑spread behavior. 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. The resulting dataset may lead to discovery of new pathways for predictive modeling of flame spread across materials, configurations, and environments, thereby strengthening the scientific basis for fire‑safety engineering. Broader impacts include enabling safer material design, expanding diagnostic capability for combustion research, and training students in advanced optical measurement techniques that support both academic and industry needs. 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.