Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
177 - Physics-Based Modelling of Fire Spread with Francesco Restuccia
Wildfire modelling is quite complicated when you wish to integrate different fuel packages with different properties in 'real' environmental conditions while managing the transition to/from smouldering. We have a model for each, but how do we make them work in unison without relying too much on their users' skills? This is a subject for a good research grant... a very big one. And this is something 'we' just got!
A fire scientist from King's College London, Dr Francesco Restuccia, has just secured an ERC grant for his innovative project on wildfire modelling. The project name is Wildfires and Climate Change: Physics-Based Modelling of Fire Spread in a Changing World.
In this podcast episode, we will discuss his current focus on developing physics-based models that promise to enhance our understanding of wildfire dynamics. We also focus on Francesco's current experience in batteries and how that experience translates to the work he is carrying out in the wildfires.
Throughout the episode, we explore the diverse range of models that predict wildfire behaviour, from straightforward empirical approaches to intricate physics-based simulations. We dive into the complexities of balancing ease of use with accuracy and discuss the exciting potential of reduced-order models that blend empirical data with physical insights. Dr. Restuccia offers a unique perspective on the challenges of automating complex models for broader applications and the necessity of identifying fire regimes to ensure precision is not compromised.
Dr. Restuccia also shares invaluable insights into securing an ERC grant, guiding aspiring researchers. From refining research ideas into a cohesive project to preparing for the competitive interview process, his experience underscores the importance of mentorship and strategic planning. We wrap up with a look at the future possibilities his research holds for fire safety engineering, inviting listeners to explore the transformative impact of advanced wildfire modelling on a global scale.
The grant description can be found here: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101161183
Do you have questions or want to send out your CV? The man told me to place his e-mail here... so here it is: francesco.restuccia@kcl.ac.uk
Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.
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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. Its celebration time. Fire Science got another ERC grant that is relevant to fire safety engineering. For me as a scientist it's really a thing to cherish, because ERC, the European Research Council grants, are the Formula One of science. It's the dream and as you can imagine, those grants being the holy grail for literally every single researcher out there. They are so competitive and so difficult to obtain almost impossible. And yet we had ERC grant. But Professor Ruben van C two years ago awarded ERC starting grant and Ruben is well into his research that we've talked about in the podcast two years ago.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And today I have a possibility to choose another ERC laureate. That is Dr Francesco Restuccia from King's College London, my very good friend, and I am so happy for Francesco. So, francesco, you know him from the podcast. He was talking here about batteries and a lot of his recent research is about fire safety of batteries and he indeed does some amazing work in that space. But the grant is completely different. The grant is all about modeling wildfires and his approach to modeling to merge tons of other models that already exist, to find scales at which the transition happens, the regimes change, and create new, better models that would have higher technical complexity or better accuracy than the current ones and yet be applicable and usable, which will definitely create space for new frontiers of fire safety engineering real-time modeling of wildfire, progress, sensitivity studies for fuel management, perhaps assistance for management of WE communities A lot of possibilities that may open after this grant is completed and after Francesco integrates the knowledge that's around and adds his own research on top of that.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Anyway, this episode has kind of two parts. So two-thirds of the episode we discuss about the ERC grant itself. So we discuss the models and everything that Francesco wants to do in his grant, and the last one-third of the episode is more towards young researchers who also share the dream of getting an ERC grant on their own. So the last part we've spent just talking about the process of obtaining such a massive grant and some, let's say, coaching recommendations for people on what does it mean to write an ESC grant? What are you looking for? What should you focus on? Perhaps, that said, some good mentoring. Francesco is one of the best mentors I know in the space of fire science, so I'm sure these are some useful advice to young scholars. Anyway, let's stop talking and give the microphone to the man. So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Welcome to the Fire science Show. My name is Wojciech Wegrzyński and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment. Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just seven years, with offices across the country in seven locations, from Edinburgh to Bath, and now employing more than a hundred professionals. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research, experience and diligence for effective, tailored fire safety solutions. In 2024, ofr will grow its team once more and is always keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures this year. Get in touch at oafrconsultantscom. Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. I am joined today again by Dr Francesco Restuccia. Hey, francesco, good to have you back in the show.
Francesco Restuccia:Thank you again for the invitation. Ojec Nice to see you.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And look, mate, a man who lists two Fire Science Show episodes at the top of his CV got the ERC. I'm kind of not surprised. Joe Rogan can make you a US president, so I guess this podcast helps you in the career a little bit.
Francesco Restuccia:No, yeah, I always enjoy coming to the Five Science Show, also because you make me think about the problems I work on and having to explain them, and so, yeah, it's always really, really interesting, and I listen to all of your episodes. I still don't know how you managed to make so many episodes and where you find the time, but they're fantastic.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:You're in the middle of making one. So let's say you have insight to the backend and, anyway, fantastic job on the batteries and everything you've been doing. But the ERC you've submitted is so far away from the world of battery that I'm used to interview you in. So let me do it properly. Let me read out the starting grant name that you've just got Wildfires and Climate Change, physics-based Modeling of Fire Spread in a Changing World Acronym Fire Mod. So this is what you just got funded in the ERC scheme. For those who don't know, who are listening, this is like this, is it? That's the top. You cannot go any further, at least in the European Union and the islands around it. So, francesco, tell me the genesis of that, like what made you write a wildfire and climate proposal and how long that has been in your head.
Francesco Restuccia:So my research group so I run the research group Heat and Fire Lab, and my group, as you say, predominantly focuses on batteries has kind of three strands. So I have the heat side, where I do thermal management. I look at biomass, I look a little bit on hydrogen and then I have the fire dynamics part, and the fire dynamics is sort of split into two. One is the fire dynamics of batteries. I look at fire spread, I look at ignition, I look at suppression. Myself and my team and I had currently one, two PhD students who have been working on wildfire, but again it's an area that's smaller in my group.
Francesco Restuccia:I was interested in wildfire for a long time because from a fire dynamics perspective it's one of the most complex phenomena to study at a lab scale and a large scale because there are many, many differences and so there are a lot of similarities and in fact I used a lot of what I learned in my past work. Both in the ignition work that I did during my PhD with Guillermo Reina at Imperial, in my battery work, especially the fire spread in batteries. I saw some similarities and some differences and what really interested me on wildfires for a long, long time has been the fact that they can do so much damage when they're uncontrolled. I come from Italy. We have wildfires all the time. I come from southern Italy, but if you look at Greece, you look at Spain, you look at Portugal, there are a lot of very large scale wildfires and we've been doing a lot of work operationally across the world to try and understand them. But there is still a lot to be done, and so I started really looking at this maybe five years ago. I started thinking about this and then it took a few years to develop sort of an idea of what I thought I could contribute, and so a lot of my current past work before the CRC has really been on the sensitivity. So PhD student Imogen Richards in my group has really focused on the sensitivity of physical parameters for wildfires, and so I was really interested in understanding how different variables affect the output.
Francesco Restuccia:Right, all of our models are models. When we do modeling, they have an input, they have an output, they have multiple inputs usually, and often we look at multiple outputs, and what really interested me for the last couple of years was okay, how does my input change my output? So I often think of data as if my data is garbage going in. The data I'm getting out is definitely going to be garbage. And so if I'm doing a model and I have an experimental data point, my experimental data point will have some error. And how will that error, how will that change affect my output?
Francesco Restuccia:Now, in the real world, in wildfires, it's not an error, it's the variability of a fuel, variability of nature, right? So you can have an area which has a certain moisture content on a certain day, in a certain wind, in a certain slope, and then another day, a week later, completely different boundary conditions. And so I really wanted to look at and I looked at the past models, because there's been many models on ignition, on spread, and I want to really look at the fundamentals to understand how we can scale these fire models.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I had some episodes on wildfires, a lot of them on wildfires in the fire science shows, as you know, and models do kind of exist, like we have this Rothamilz model which lasts for I don't know how many decades already, but it's been the basis of the 1970s.
Francesco Restuccia:Exactly, it's 50 years almost.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Happy 50th birthday. Anyway, we have those tools to allow us to model or predict to some extent the wildfires. Everyone is familiar with the maps of fire hazard. Right, we have the tools that assist firefighters on the scene with this likely spread of fires. So is there really such a gap? If you could extract one thing that's lacking from the current models, that justifies doing this massive research project Absolutely.
Francesco Restuccia:Yeah, so it's a sort of two problem, right? When you do a model, you have, let's say, y-axis and x-axis. If we look at an axis, y-axis physical fidelity, x-axis applicability, right. So the further right bottom you are, the most applicable it is, but maybe it has less physics. So a Rotterdam model, so any pure empirical wildfire model that maybe has a few physical input parameters but is very empirical or operational models like a Rotterdam model really sit on lower physical fidelity but applicability to many, many scenarios.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I'll stop you for a second, because I realize the audience may not be that familiar with Rotterdam model. It's not something most fire engineers would use. So Rotterdam model is basically one equation and you put up things like slope moisture. Is there wind in it as well?
Francesco Restuccia:Yes, there's wind, so you look at wind. So effectively. Rotterdam model takes a flame and it has a contact with the fuel. That flame has some radiation, some convection and then some solid mass transport. No, no, no, you're over. So variables you put in are effectively size, temperature, moisture. So you have a few physical variables you put in and then you get out a rate of spread Exactly.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So super simple, like one equation. You put up the variables, you get the rate of spread. Then that's the most applicable because it takes you a second to solve. But it lacks the physical depth of everything and the other end of scale.
Francesco Restuccia:The other end of scale is so, exactly, if you go to the very high physical fidelity so, for example, physics-based direct numerical simulation of wildfires then you are very, very detailed so you can focus on which aspects. So let's say, you really want to get detailed kinetics, you really want to understand how that fuel degradation happens. You can get a very, very good understanding, but it's very limited in application because you can't extract those results for many other results and so it's very, very high physical fidelity but very low applicability to diverse scenarios. Let's say, so those are the two extremes. You have stuff in the middle, right. That's called reduced order models. And so in the middle between fully empirical and fully physics-based, you have reduced order models. Those are either semi-empirical models or there's lots of AI and data-trained models. Those are somewhere in the middle, right? So you have some physics and some operational aspects, some empirical aspects, and every model has advantages and disadvantages. The best you know. If you really want to understand how a fuel will degrade and the kinetics of a fuel for a very, very specific scenario, then you do lots of detailed kinetics, right. If you don't really care about that, then you say well, I have so many heterogeneous fuels. I just want to understand roughly the rate of spread in this with these physical conditions. Then you have the fully empirical model.
Francesco Restuccia:But to understand the changing fire regimes and understand the different theories, because, again, when I look at the physics-based fully physics-based I give you the example of kinetics, but I could also say I can take a full physics-based one for atmospheric models, right?
Francesco Restuccia:So I say, well, I want to understand the very large, large scale spread of these clouds of megafires that maybe are spreading very, very largely. Then I would use a very detailed atmospheric model to understand that sort of propagation. Or let's say I wanted to understand the transition between smoldering and flaming fires, which are really different scales, right, so some are centimeters per hour, the other ones are meters or kilometers per hour, depending how fast it's going, and so then you would need a model that's very good for that flaming or smoldering regime. Or let's say you wanted to understand the risk okay, this is less for wildfires but in general for fire modeling the risk of deflagration, right, then you focus on very specific type of models where pressure becomes very important, and so it really depends on which physical variable and to establish fire spread transport thresholds for diverse environments. So let's say you're looking at centimeters versus kilometers. We use different models for physics-based, and that's actually the problem that I encounter when I use a lot of models. Every model is useful for some scenario, right Okay?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:so you would use FDS for, let's say, compartment scale fire. But FDS is tricky when you want to do urban configuration and it's tricky if you want to investigate a matchstick, for example, because the scale is too small. So you have models for different scale and in your applicability versus technical complexity thing I would assume that some sort of crown achievement would be technically advanced model which would be as applicable as Rotterman model, exactly.
Francesco Restuccia:I think that's the future. Yeah, so when I say what is my ideal model, it would be a physics-based model that has the same applicability range as a raw thermal model. Right, because then you can get very detailed physics included and incorporated into something that's very diversely applicable.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:But in here applicability could be also understood as user-friendliness or the difficulty in use of the model. So Rotterdam model is extremely easy to use because you basically can make a spreadsheet and you just put in your slope, your moisture, your wind and you get the outcome. Or you have already made packages that can import a topographical map of your terrain and just release the fire and it already knows the wind, already knows the snow. It's so easy to apply. Yet the extreme complex models you've mentioned DNS modeling of the fuel package Jesus Christ that's. I got chills when you told me that because I know how much work would be setting up that model. So is there any shortcut that we could apply those complex models in a simple way, like perhaps automate them to some way? Is there any shortcut that we could apply those complex models in a simple way, like perhaps automate them to some way?
Francesco Restuccia:So yes, if we can find the thresholds for applicability, which is actually so if you look at the summary page of my grant, I had to write for the EU like a half a pager of you know why is this important as a project. And I think if we can find the scales where changing fire regimes actually change, right, so if we can look at temporal and spatial scales to understand those changing regimes, fires are driven by different heat. The dominant heat transfer mechanism changes as the fire changes, right, so you could have convection driven, radiation driven. So if we can find those changing fire regimes, when we include vegetation dynamics which is really the tricky part when we look at this from wildfires, then we can start scaling up maybe those fine mesh models that you were talking about, where we have all the complexity to larger grid sizes and not lose accuracy. And then sort of the third aspect. So that's all heat and modeling-based, but the third aspect which is fundamental from fire is also understanding the effects of the different fire spread regimes, right.
Francesco Restuccia:So if I have a regime that's a fast fire I really enjoyed last two weeks ago.
Francesco Restuccia:It was a paper in Nature and it was the science and it was the cover and it was fast fires right, and I said, oh fast, what do they mean by fast? Then they meant fast spreading. But when we can look at those let's say, fast or slow fires and we can integrate the different behaviors of both in our model, then we can make a very predictive tool right. Because if we have a predictive tool that can also be used operationally I think that's sort of the long-term vision of where I think we eventually need a FHIR model to be Then you can say, okay, those FHIR risk maps that you mentioned, actually we can do something a lot more accurate for this specific scenario. So let's say, we have a risk of FHIR here, we plug it into a quick model, hopefully, and that quick model will tell us, yes, no, and this spread or this spread right. That's sort of the long-term goal, I think, where fire modeling can go, because, as you said, there's lots of fire spread models and they're very useful in different scenarios.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I've been calling smoldering fires the slow fires since always and I'm very happy that science has taken the fire science nomenclature for fires and now applies them on the covers. That's good on the covers. That's good, do you think? Because in your paper I find a lot of like really interesting things, and then you could expect that from ESC grants up to like using satellite readings, remote sensing and everything. So immediately in my head I see this applicability of a model where you basically are in a part of a terrain and you know the topography from the GIS maps, you know the current weather from the satellites, you know where the fire is from your remote sensing units, and then everything happens on the back end and just provides you with an accurate, quick, robust prediction. Is this this high end of applicability that you're?
Francesco Restuccia:talking about Exactly that. So if I was to summarize that in a sentence right, you want a holistic, real-time risk prediction and fuel management tool that's based on identifiable fuel and landscape, right? Because if you know the landscape, as you said, and you know the fuel, then you can either have the risk prediction or the fuel management prediction. If we want to manage that fuel instead all in one tool, yeah, that's, I think, the goal, that's, I think, where we want to be with a fire model, let's say, in 10 years' time. And what's stopping us from having it right now?
Francesco Restuccia:Identifying the driving, heat transfer and chemical thresholds for the varying scales. So, when we look at satellites right, so you mentioned Rotterdam in the 1970s. Then we had a lot of satellites used for wildfire protection since 2005. So it's been 20 years. But there's a size limit, right. There's a grid and a satellite image will have a certain scale, and then there's even the larger ones, the atmospheric ones, for very, very large scale. But identifying the thresholds for the varying scales is what's missing at the moment, so Finiacal. If you remember, there was a paper in the Presidio of the National Academy of Sciences about 10 years ago where they really looked at that convection-driven fire spread. So that's identifying a threshold, right, that's identifying the heat transfer mechanism for that specific type. If we had that for more types and not just convection, and not just one type of fuel, that's kind of what's missing at the moment, in my opinion. Guillermo wrote an accolade to nature about that work Fantastic work, fantastic experimental and theoretical work in my opinion. Yeah, it was a great paper.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And those gaps, so you must have proposed a way forward to solve it. If you got this five-year funding, yeah, what are the next steps for you and your group? How do you think we can move towards incorporating all of those models and identifying those scale challenges?
Francesco Restuccia:So obviously, yeah, we can't work on everything right. So I've given you lots and lots of problems and lots and lots of variables that can be studied, but obviously we can't focus on all of them. And so, as you can read on my fact sheet for the grant, if you have a look, I sort of focus on three different methods in parallel. And so, again, I'm interested in the prediction and understanding of the occurrence of uncontrolled fires and I'm interested in a physical, fundamental physical model. So again, there's lots of different types of models. I really am interested in advancing the physical model of fire spread process for different conditions and different fuel types and so sort of. I look at three methods in parallel. That's what my group would like to look at in this project. The first one is studying fires across temporal and spatial scales, right To understand those, changing fire regimes and bringing in vegetation dynamics. The second one is understanding fire on multiple scales and that will help us scale up from those, you know, small scale fine mesh models to large grid sizes. And then the last one is to integrate that effect of you call them slow and fast fire, so integrating the effect of smoldering, combustion into the modeling of fire spread, just something that is not done often, and that's sort of the methodology and tools.
Francesco Restuccia:And again, the wider context. If I look back, you know lots of people already work on wildfires, and you know this already. But the larger aspect is really the human side as well. You know we have over a billion people a year impacted by wildfire smoke. If I look at European Union alone you know I'm again from Italy we have over 4 billion euros of wildfire cost a year right Worldwide. We emit from wildfires over 2000 megatons of CO2 a year, and so it's a larger scale problem. It's not just the engineering and the fire science one that we're interested in, it's also the health aspects and so on. Again, I focus on the engineering because that's my expertise, but the wildfire problem is much larger than just this one.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I also like that you've included the climate aspect in your proposal and in the B1 that you've sent me. You've shown the Arctic region and different types of of wildfire, wildlife or vegetation interactions that can be happening there, and also smoldering, like transition from climbing to smoldering, smoldering to flaming. Can you comment on that? Why you've picked this part of the world and how does that connect you with the climate thing.
Francesco Restuccia:Great question, question again. So different vegetation. So I picked different fuel areas and different fuel properties and you pointed out one. So the sort of Arctic ones was an example I used because there's been a lot of recent data on Arctic ones. I also picked ones more Mediterranean because I was interested in seeing how there is data on fuel. So I wanted to look at the data on the different fuel properties of different fuels in different areas to have a better understanding of ignition properties of them.
Francesco Restuccia:So the first part of fire spread is the fire to ignite right. And so there's been a lot of work on ignition and I wanted to bring together that work that already exists on ignition, especially North America, Arctic and Europe, to differentiate if I could see which physical variable is most important there. And that brings us back to the sensitivity work. My PhD student, Imogen Richards, does. So a lot of this work we have already done sort of a feasibility work before in her PhD thesis is to sort of get a better understanding of the physical parameters, sensitivity to change.
Francesco Restuccia:So if I have, let's say, that Arctic fuel and it had a 10% difference in moisture, how will that change my ignition? How will that change my spread, If it's 20%, or if it's a wind change of 10%, or if it's a terrain change, slope change of 10%, how will that change my output? And so sort of having a database of fuel properties from all those different areas will help me then make a model that's more applicable. Because if I can say, well, actually, Arctic okay, let's simplify it infinitely let's say Arctic, Polish and Italian terrain, they're all behaving identically, even though they're very different. Now they're not, but hypothetically they are right. Then the input in my model let's say you're the user who wants to use an operational model when you go click input, you can choose any terrain. Right, it won't matter. Obviously there are differences, and so then you'll have to choose the terrain that matches most the problem you're trying to solve, and so you'll have a database there that you can use for inputs and you'll know what the sensitivity of that input is.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah. So in other words, you could expect that a fire in Siberia, a fire in southern Italy, in the middle of Poland and in Berkeley, those are four completely different wildfires. And today I don't think the Rothamil model could predict the boreal fire at all because it did not have the smoldering component in it. So, by definition, you would most likely have different models for each of those. Yes, and in a way, those differences in your variables would be hidden within the empirical constraints of those models, in each of them, somewhere Exactly of gravity for fires, you know where, instead of defining a model for each of them, you understand what makes the difference between a fire in Calabria versus a fire in Siberia and because you know the difference, you know when the regime changes and when different variables start to be the key players. That's brilliant. Yeah, exactly that's the goal.
Francesco Restuccia:That's all of the problem to solve. But then you obviously need more inputs to do that right. And so let's say that you let's use that remote sensing you mentioned since you mentioned satellites and remote sensing. If we can then have enhanced remote sensing to say, actually we know what, these are the differences that we're looking for so we can use an input data, that aspect that we, the model, we modelers, say this is what we need and hopefully you can make it automated, as you say, so we can extract some of that data as it comes in right, then we can use enhanced remote sensing to inform our model. And that's, I think, how you eventually you'll reach a real time risk prediction, because then you'll know some variables about the area you're in, but you don't need to know every single variable, because if you needed to know every single variable your model would take. It's fantastic from a scientific point of view, but it would take months to run and so it's not very useful for a prediction or real-time prediction.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:One thing that I've missed in the project, and it becomes very apparent to me that it's necessary. Perhaps it's there, I just have not seen this how do you quantify the fuel packages? Do you have any idea for automated quantifying the fuel packages? Because if you want it to be super user friendly, uh, you cannot have everything and the user have to provide you correct the distribution of species available in the local flora so.
Francesco Restuccia:So I have some ideas on that. I'm still testing them, so I think, yeah, I have a few threads that I'm trying there. On fuel packages, that's a fantastic question, wojciech. At the moment you can find, for example let's simplify it massively, which I think we'll never get to this point, but let's say you compare that yellow fuel versus green fuel, right Dry versus wet, right. That's for a user very easy to see. Look at the picture like oh, this is yellow, this is green. I think that's not realistic, like you're never going to get to such a granularity of a seal package, so you need something more detailed. But how detailed to make it is actually part of this project. So so one of my work packages is literally figuring out how, how granular does it have to be?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:so again, sensitivity, where, when it starts making uh, impact, correct? I'm asking that because you know, know, in the Fire Science Show we are very, to some extent, connected to buildings Because of me I'm a building person. Guillermo once called me a building person. I found that really funny. Anyway, as a building person, you know, I try to see links between what you are doing and what we're missing in the world of compartment fires, because it's the same, you know, not the exact same problem, but it's the same drivers, you know the same heat transfers, the same pyrolysis process, moisture perhaps to a lesser content, but the prevalence of polymers and everything to some extent reassembles the moisture problem in wildfires.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So whenever you explain the model for wildfires, I in my head it immediately makes the link how could we have something like that in the buildings? You know, and it is very interesting to me if we could have similar models like I just, you know, have a 360 cam. I put it into a compartment. It immediately knows what fuels I have in the compartment, builds me a model, solves the CFD and tells me how quickly it's going to flash over and how likely it's going to spread. That would be a phenomenal thing, perhaps if someone's listening and wants to write a second. You see a long compartment fires. Just the same as Francesco, but in buildings, parts too that could work out. Anyway, I think this remote identification of fuels at the level of variables that are important to solve, that would be a phenomenal breakthrough, because this is what moves your applicability on your applicability charts, this is what moves it to the right, because that takes so much burden of the user of the software.
Francesco Restuccia:And, as you know, and as anyone who looks at wildfire knows, some of those properties are known right. So we know that there's a difference between dead and live fuels. We know there's a difference when we do modeling of the physics. We know there's a difference between bound and free water in a fuel. We know there's a very, very big difference in fire when your surface area to volume ratio changes, right, that's a very big effect, and so that really changes the ability of your fuel to ignite, right Surface area to volume ratio. And so there are physical parameters that we know very, very well, and so it's sort of bringing those together for those thresholds into eventually a tool, as you say, that is easy to use, because then it's more applicable.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah. So because you're starting, I'm not going to ask you about what's going to be the end. That's the point of VRC.
Francesco Restuccia:Exactly so. Everything I've been telling you is what I thought about until now. I haven't started this project yet, so it's great because it can evolve as I work through the project. It starts in March.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:But I can interrogate you on what we've learned over the last decade. That made it possible? Because there's a transient nature of the research and ERC is a highly competitive scheme and I bet there have been people applying for ESC grants with wildfires. When I was attending an ESC training in 2018-19, I think that's when we first started talking about doing ESCs. At the same time, I just dropped a dream. I'm happy that you fulfilled it for both of us. Anyway, in 2018-19, I attended this training where a lady told us oh yeah, there's wildfires. This starts to be interesting. This could be sexy enough for ERC. So I'm sure a lot of people got the same advice. A lot of people probably have tried to, but there have been massive, massive breakthroughs. We've already mentioned one uh finney and others paper on the role of convective heat transfer, and there was also a brilliant work from uh adamowe Eric Milos about convective heat transfer in thin fuel packages. I had Eric on the podcast. It was brilliant. Any other major enablers of what you're able to do right?
Francesco Restuccia:now A lot of the work from NIST, obviously. So there's been a lot of work in NIST. There's been a lot of work in the US Forest Service. There's been a lot of recent work in California because there's been a lot of investment in California From the smoldering perspective, professor Rain's work and a lot of those larger scale experiments that came out of his ERC as well when he had an ERC consolidator grant.
Francesco Restuccia:Those are all fundamental physical parameters that are useful. There's a lot of models around Europe, a lot of models in France and the French research groups I am terrible with names, so please don't ask me with names but there's a lot, a lot of modeling work that's been done for a lot of the fundamental aspects. And then from a combustion side, yeah, there's a lot of previous work that we have done on heterogeneity in general in our community. That, I think, is an enabler. You know, without this, you know you asked me. We discussed DRCs years ago and for me wildfire was always like a fundamental passion of mine, something I was always interested in research-wise in the last years. But the reason I wrote this now is that I couldn't have done this work 10 years before because we didn't have a lot of those physical models and physical understanding. We didn't have a lot of the sensitivity in our remote sensing capabilities. For example, we didn't have much data on smoldering to flaming transition. It was very limited to very particular fuels, again mostly for the built environment and not for the wildlands. And so, yeah, I think there's been a lot, a lot of work. I mentioned europe and north america, but also in asia, there's been a lot of work in japan on the different fuels and so a lot of those tools have come together. That's why I said it took me five years almost of thinking about this idea.
Francesco Restuccia:We started discussing, I remember, 2018, 2019, as you say, but it was sort of bringing together, one, the aspects that already exist and, two, my expertise has changed right, so I could bring in a lot of what I've learned from doing fire for batteries into this, and so a lot of the work I've done on radiation and on fire spread from batteries. There's a lot of similarities and applicability. So I think I've learned a lot in the past five years that helped me add to this ground to make it doable, because I think the high risk nature you know when you ride an ERC, there always has to be a high risk, but there has to be a feasibility of your scientific approach and the high risk was there five years ago, like it is today, but the feasibility changed as the time progressed because I could try different ideas. A lot of that work that Imogen Richards did in her PhD was feasibility trying some of my crazy ideas to see the sensitivity of fuels and so on. And so, yeah, I think there's been a lot in the literature, but also there's a lot of work that I've done to sort of give myself a reasonable chance of success right In this project once I've written it At the beginning.
Francesco Restuccia:The high risk I think everyone, as you say, finds a lot of people find wildfires, and uncontrolled wildfires specifically, a very important problem to tackle. It's just, yeah, how do we make it feasible?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I haven't picked on that uncontrolled. Can you elaborate?
Francesco Restuccia:on that? Yeah, so I say uncontrolled because sometimes we control fire spread so we want fire to start. Fire management policy often has controlled fire, so you want things to burn because it frees up areas that could then potentially be fuel sources for very, very large fires, and those fires we know how to predict pretty well. The controlled fires. Uncontrolled is where we are not controlling. There's a lot of other variables that might've accidentally started. It might've we might not know all the fuel parameters. So control versus uncontrolled for me the definition changes. But I call uncontrolled fires the ones that we are not starting and containing intentionally.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:But if not discretized between good and bad fires, because there are uncontrolled fires, like savannah fires, which are essential for the ecosystem and we're not really aiming on suppressing those Absolutely.
Francesco Restuccia:So the purpose of my work is not to decide which fire is a good one and which one is a bad one. There's a lot of ecological aspects there that I do not have the expertise to tackle. So I think, yeah, between good and bad fires there's a lot of very interesting work. It's just it's outside the realm of my expertise so I contain myself to. I want to understand the fire spread and the transition for fire spreads. I think there's lots of other work to be done on wildfires. You know this is one project of five years. I think there is enough work from fundamental aspects of wildfires that could take on. You know, 50 years worth of projects. And the ecological aspects there is very important. You want an ecosystem to be balanced, and so sometimes you need in fact, very often you do need fires to ensure that you have new fauna, you have an environment that is suitable for the species that are living there.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And well, another aspect that is kind of missing and I find it interesting because it's an angle that a lot of people take on wildfire problem, which is the wildfire urban interface, wui as they tend to call it and my automatic translator always collapses when it hears WUI. Anyway, there's no WUI in this project. It's not human-oriented. You don't talk about the human sources of ignition or human-related hazards and how that affects wildfires. For you it's just the fundamental combustion fires and that's it. No matter if it's started by a human or naturally.
Francesco Restuccia:So for this project the short answer is yes. In my research, no, in the sense that you know, Abdullah Rehman is a recent PhD student in my group and he focuses on refires, and so I think there's a lot of aspects there that are very important and we are actually working on that in my group. But for here I was more interested in the fundamentals. Again, I couldn't tackle everything. One of the aspects that I think and I think I even put it in my in my proposal is one of the aspects that fundamentally affects those transitions and those changes are the changes in our environment. Right, and so if you have a wildland urban interface versus a pure wildland area, versus a concrete building inside, right, your fire scenario is different because your boundary condition is different. So that could be an input.
Francesco Restuccia:But this grant itself was not primarily focused on that aspect, the human aspect. I was really interested in the fundamental. But again, in my group we do work on this and Abdullah has just started his PhD, so we'll see how it goes. He's a month and a half in, so plenty of time to develop his ideas. But he's working on wild alabaster face work as part of the Leverhulme Trust Wildfire Center.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Fantastic. I'll now let you summarize in a few sentences where you hope to be in five years after finishing this grant and afterwards. I would love to pick your brain because there's a lot of young academics listening to this podcast and obviously that that's a big part of the audience and you achieve the Holy grail for researchers and scholars who are just starting. You just got the ERC starting grant, so if I could pick your brain for a few minutes about the route to getting there and let's wrap up the meaty part of the interview and go into coaching session afterwards, are you?
Francesco Restuccia:fine with that, absolutely, if I can help. Yes, I mean okay. So if I have to summarize my project in five years, where do I want to be? Definitely the development of a new prediction tool, or prediction tools, plural, as you said, it might vary. I want to train engineers and modelers to adopt to changing scenarios. You know this project will have PhD students and postdocs and I want to train them to adapt because then they will bring in future work, hopefully themselves, and they can start new strands.
Francesco Restuccia:And then, from a physics perspective, I really want to say that in five years we have identified distinct driving, heat transfer and chemical mechanism thresholds for varying scales of fire. That, I would say, are my sort of top three things in five years. And the fourth one is sort of a wishlist for me is engage with you stakeholders. You said there's risk maps, there's a lot of operational work being done and I would hope that in five years time I could engage with you. You stakeholders say look, this is the fundamental work we've done, this is a tool, can this be implemented, can this be used?
Francesco Restuccia:I would say those are the four. If I have to say four things, those are the four things that I want, if you ask me, in 10 years. I would hope this work because this is a five-year project, but I would hope this work in 10 years time would have hopefully started. I would say being able to have a holistic predictive fire model based on identifiable fuel landscape that gives you real-time risk prediction and fuel management. But that's in 10 years, I would say. I would say the five years are the fourth point I gave you, but I would hope in the field in 10 years we are at that real time risk prediction and field management.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Brilliant and I will be monitoring that closely and follow up with you very often on that. So let's talk about the journey to ERC because, as I said, there's multiple young researchers listening to this podcast not only young, but, like ERC, is open to anyone and everyone. In academia, there are those few holy grails you can get in academia. You know full professorship and the ERC grants I would say are also kind of a holy grail. When did it really start? When did you decide this is something to pursue and how much of your efforts was to optimize for this? Because I've been on the journey as well and I know that C-Grant is not something you wake up on a Sunday morning and you start writing on a Monday. It's a process. So what was the time horizon for this?
Francesco Restuccia:for you. I think it changes person by person. I can tell you my experience. So my experience is I think there's always a little bit of luck. So you know, I'm very, very fortunate, I'm very lucky to have this grant.
Francesco Restuccia:But my experience was I started my independent academic career five, six, six years ago and I had a very supportive mentor, my PhD supervisor, guillermo Reyn, who encouraged me to sort of think about my own ideas and not just the projects I was working on. And I was thinking of other ideas and other projects. But as I kept on doing my work and writing proposals because as an academic you need proposals to fund your group, right, you need funding to hire PhD students and postdocs my work was sort of moving more and more in the battery direction and I was learning lots of new skills. But I still had this fundamental question that I mentioned at the start about wildfires, because again, it's a problem that affects my area of the world in Italy as well, and I was very interested. So I was reading up on papers in the area and I had started a PhD student in the area.
Francesco Restuccia:In fact, my first PhD student at King's was on wildfires and not on batteries, because it was an area I really wanted to grow in, where I didn't have funding but I wanted to learn more, and so it was a learning process for me. And then it was iterative in the sense that I wrote my first proposal, not for ERC I always had in the back of my mind ERC but I wrote some funding proposals in the UK and they didn't get funded. But I got some feedback right and so it was a feedback mechanism of this is an idea. It was for smaller projects, like two-year projects or three-year projects, and then I wrote a seven-year project, one and I had to write a short summary of it to see if I would be selected for the next stages, and that's where I sort of spent a long time two page on where do I want to be in seven years, and this was something that kept coming up. Now that didn't go through.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So this was something you applied with in UK for the lower rank grant. Yeah, so part of this not all of this right.
Francesco Restuccia:So part of these ideas, so part of these, let's say so, there's a lot of different parts of this grant and parts of these ideas I have been developing for other grants. Then I spent a little bit of time putting all of those ideas together into something bigger, because I realized that each one of those pieces of the puzzle could bring a more useful fundamental theory right, a useful fundamental tool. And so I would say it was iterative in the sense that they were all areas that I was interested in. And then there were new papers coming out in the field showing different things. I say, oh, actually there's now enough information to try and do some of the things I wanted to do on a more large scale. So bring in that remote sensing aspect and so on. And so that was sort of the stage of writing, and that's how I came up with this idea. Then obviously I had to flesh it out, so then I put things together. Some of the ideas were clashing so I had to rewrite some of the bits to make sure I came up with a holistic idea I guess that's from a writing perspective In terms of getting the grant itself.
Francesco Restuccia:Then, once you're invited for an interview for an ERC, so you've written a proposal, then it's getting feedback right. So when you do the interview for the ERC, you have to give a five-minute pitch. And so when you do the interview for the ERC, you have to give a five-minute pitch. And I wrote my five-minute pitch and I asked a lot of professors in the fire science community if they could give me the time to listen and give me feedback. And many of these professors I had never met and they were very, very kind and they said absolutely, and so it's reach out to the wider community.
Francesco Restuccia:And so I got lots of feedback on my five-minute pitch from many different people, my five minute pitch from many different people, and I then implemented them because they told me okay, this is what's understandable, this was not understandable in my idea, these are some of the holes, and so that helped me refine a little bit my sort of pitch, and so I would say that aspect was very, very useful, as well as getting feedback from peers, because you don't, I don't know everything. Most young academics don't know everything, and so it's very, very useful to see what others think of sort of your vision, let's say. In fact, wojciech, I discussed my vision with you in the past as well, I would like to move back, yeah.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Because also, no, at some point you were unsure which direction to go, because you obviously are very strong in batteries, right? So I would say, like the natural consequence of your involvement with battery fires, for which you've already built your name in the industry, when did you decide it's going to be wildfire, not battery grant?
Francesco Restuccia:and why? Very good question. So yeah, as you said, a lot of my recent work in fact almost all of my papers in the last four years have been on battery fires, and so my CV, as you say, reads much more targeted towards writing this on battery fires. But then there's lots of interesting work to do on battery fires and I have projects on battery fires. But I thought if I'm writing an ERC, I want to work on something that I think is going to have a very, very long and large impact, and it's something that can only be funded and can only be done if I have enough resources for something very large scale and for battery fires, I can break down those problems into smaller problems and I can get those funded.
Francesco Restuccia:I think to do a fundamental model like the one I described here is not possible with smaller projects, and that's what I realized when I was writing the smaller projects is you don't have enough data, and so I said I will write in the ERC on wildfire.
Francesco Restuccia:So I said I will write in the ERC on wildfire and it is a risk, as you said. It was a risk because all my recent papers were not. I have papers on wildfires, but all my recent papers were not on wildfires but I brought in and so when I was writing it. So let's say that often you're writing your ERC on something very different to what you did your PhD or postdocs on, because that's your fundamental idea but bring in the expertise that you've developed, the expertise that you've developed, and so I brought in a lot of the methods that I've developed doing battery fires into this. So I've learned a lot. I do a lot of fire modeling for battery fires and I learned a lot doing the modeling pros and cons and so I brought a lot of those in, especially on heat fluxes and things like this.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And did you optimize yourself as a scientist a lot for this, like choosing the places where you publish, I don't know choosing the activities you engage for? Was this driven by your willingness to do?
Francesco Restuccia:ERC. So short answer is no. So my philosophy is I should only publish work if it's impactful. So maybe I publish a little bit less often than I should, but no, so I did not sort of develop my CV around this grant. I developed my research themes around the work I think is interesting. Obviously, some of your grants might be based on what is fundable, right. So if at the moment there is no wildfire funding ever anywhere, then you have to apply for other projects, right, built environment and so on. But because, again, you need to keep your group going and so some of that is driven by the market in the sense of what is fundable, research, wise. But no, I did not develop my CV around it. But I would encourage anyone to engage.
Francesco Restuccia:And you know, I think it was extremely useful for me, for example, to do the fire science show with you when you first first started the first.
Francesco Restuccia:Why was what? Episode 40? Something? Because it got to my work scene, so I got other people asking me about some of the things I was doing, and so it also helped me make new contacts and learn a lot more from other groups, because I can't read everything that comes out in the literature, but if somebody says, oh, we've been working on this, for me it's great, and I say, oh, I can read this now, right, and so I think, taking the opportunities for the outreach, taking the opportunities, for example, to review right, I think it's very important in our field to also help the growth of the field. But no, I would say, you know, my CV was not driven around the ERC and also my daytime job. You know I do research but I also have to teach, I have to do admin, I'm an academic, so I have a lot of other tasks at the university and so I can't focus all of my time on research.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And so I can't optimize my CV around research, but only research. So I've read the B1 of your project and I've also read the B1 of Ruben's project, which was I think it was a year ago or two years ago that he got his grant. Yeah, he was also in the Fire Science Show. Anyway, don't get offended, but those are basic. Those are a summary of good ideas. They don't contain a hardcore physics. They don't have like multi-level drawings of like seven dimensional correlations between stuff. Those are just simple, powerful ideas explained in a pretty simple way.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I think it's actually a challenge to talk about complex problems in a basic way that's understandable. I think that's the hell of a challenge. I guess this is the outcome of the process and it had to be optimized for that. Like yes, how hard do you find to formulate those ideas in this simple way? And how can one, a young academic, train themselves in that skill? You know, because me working with my students nowadays, I find people having ease to write a 15-page paper about something, but when they have to do you know, proceedings of Combustion Institute-style paper, when it's six pages, it's such a pain to collapse that in a way it does not lose the depth but it's more approachable. I think this is a critical skill for a high impact scientist. How do you get that?
Francesco Restuccia:skill, so I guess a part of it developed. Also, I'm on panels that do internal reviews of grants at King's and so I have to read grants in a very short time, or the short part of a grant in an area that's not mine, and sometimes when I first started doing that, when I first became an academic, I was very struggling. I was like this is very technical, what is your fundamental question? And so I think it's mentoring there, in the sense that, for example, my head of department who used to chair these panels, barbara Schollack, was. Barbara Schollack was extremely useful in this because she would always say you need to make it very clear what your work means to the lay scientist. Not the lay person, but the lay scientist.
Francesco Restuccia:Can me and you are both in fire science, but can somebody in material science understand the basics of what I'm trying to do? And so write the basic introduction, right, the introduction of your proposal. That's what your B1 is. Right, the introduction of your proposal. The introduction has to be something that another engineer who's not in your field can understand, and that took me a while. So B1, so actually B2 was, which is the long technical bit was the much easier bit to write, because there you put all the methods, you put all the physics. Those are things you're comfortable with. Then having to shorten it to something that's much more understandable and digestible in a short amount of space is, I think, a little bit harder. And that took going through and iterating and having feedback on it as well, like if my introduction to a colleague who does not work in my area and he reads it and says I have no idea what you're trying to do, it means that I need to simplify it and there, okay.
Francesco Restuccia:So when you say optimizing, so you made me think of B1. So my advice is also for your CV. So B1 has two parts. It has the summary of your research goal and has a two page or three page summary of you. And in the summary of you, obviously you have to do research achievements and you have to do peer recognition. Obviously, pick from your CV the bits that most portray what research you're trying to do. Right, if you're trying to do work on wildfires and all the papers you've picked are on facade fires, right, they're very different problems. You either have to explain why or you have to integrate it. So, obviously, for your research achievements, pick the ones that go with the narrative of what you're proposing the most.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:That would be my suggestion, yeah yeah, I find this being a very big challenge to write those short proposals that go into panel. And we have projects like that also in Poland that incorporate the same model a long, technical one that goes to technical reviewers but first it's filtered by a panel. So the reason is that we don't have enough reviewers, so we have to send to review only the things that we think are worthy enough. You know, and that's the first round you have to go through as a student, and I also find it very difficult to be able to write a summary that's interesting enough for a general audience or general technical audience because it's technical people who are going to be judging it and to be worthy sending. And how much time overall took you to write, like if you had to give me an?
Francesco Restuccia:hour or so days of work? It's hard to say because, as I said, I've been writing smaller proposals as well, so it's very hard to say it was an iterative process over the years. I'd say I thought about the idea seriously for many years and then I would say the six months before the deadline is really where I said, okay, like now, how do I make this? When I decided I was going to apply for the ERC starting out, which was my final year, so I couldn't apply again, I applied the final year of eligibility for age from PhD. I said, okay, if this is what I want to write, how will I write it into an ERC? And that was maybe that. Yeah, six months before submission.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:That's the writing and the refining process, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Francesco Restuccia:And then I would say the last month was I actually, I think I submitted 10 days before the deadline because I was coming to Japan, like you, for a conference the day of the deadline. We were at a conference, right, and so I submitted 10 days before, but sort of the month before the deadline. That was really crunch time of really refine. You have the idea, you have everything down, really refine it, make it more legible, make diagrams. You know the diagrams. I found very useful for me to think about the idea by making diagrams of them, and that was sort of in the last month especially.
Francesco Restuccia:And there will never be a perfect proposal. When I reread it, when I had the interview, I said, oh, I would change this, I would change this. Oh, you know, I could add this paper, I could add this. There's always things you can change. There's never going to be the perfect research proposal, in my opinion, and that's good because science moves on and things change. But yeah, I think you'll never reach perfection. But, yeah, make it readable is my advice, because your panel who reads it is not all going to be fire scientists. In fact, it's very unlikely that you have a panel of fire scientists reading your proposals. Our field is relatively small in engineering compared to other fields.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I think there are some high-level fire scientists who could go to those panels, so perhaps you would meet them, but again, it's just one person within the panel and they could be excluded for bias, for example. So yeah, it's challenging overall, anyway, and they could be excluded for bias, for example.
Francesco Restuccia:So yeah, it's challenging overall, anyway, francesco, once again congratulations on ESC, thank you, and I want to just say there will be ads coming out for PhD students and postdocs, so if anyone listening is interested in a PhD or a postdoc in the topic, please do send me an email. Hopefully you'll put my email in the summary. I will.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And we can also say that being a part of ESC grants is giving you a very good idea of how to run one in the future, because you also were a part of Guillermo's ERC on smoldering fires and now here you are running your own, so perhaps it's a good step in to the world of big science, and I also believe that working underneath you would be an amazing thing. So look up for those announcements and all the best, francesco. Thank you so much, oce, and that's it Once again. Congratulations, francesco. Years ago, we've talked about writing ESC grants. At the very same time, I've dropped the dream. You followed the dream and I am more than happy that you have got it. It's amazing and for all you listening, especially young scholars, what does an ERC grant also mean to the community is jobs. Francesco will be looking for two PhD students. He will be looking for two postdocs. So these are very good positions, well-funded, very prestigious. These are very good positions, well-funded, very prestigious. I think it's a very good idea to do your postdoc within an ERC grant, because it also helps you along the way. So I can just recommend that Keep your eyes open on when the position is open and you might want to join Francesco in his research For the grant itself.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:As you could imagine from the ERC scheme, this is a pretty complicated thing. In fact, this is something that Francesco has said. He tried to build up with smaller grants, with smaller funding, but eventually he realized something of that scale like a really big model for wildfire prediction that combines the combustion, the fuel management, the atmospheric effects, remote sensing, etc. Is impossible to build with smaller chunks of work. You need a really big, dedicated project to do this and this ERC answers that need. So I'm really fond to have such a model in a few years and I'm really sure that some of the ideas that are developed for the ERC scheme will also be useful for the fire science community at large, also in the building space, in the compartment fire space, in the vehicle space, in the atlantic space, wherever, because fire science is kind of universal. And that would be it for the episode today. Thank you for being here with me and, as always, next Wednesday I'll have even more fire science for you. So see you there. Bye, thank you.