Department Chair Delivers Plenary Talk at 41st International Symposium on Combustion

Arnaud Trouvé presenting a talk in auditorium.

The Chair and Professor of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering, Arnaud Trouvé, delivered a plenary talk at the 41st International Symposium on Combustion, the premier meeting for combustion science hosted by the Combustion Institute and the Combustion Society of Japan.

“I was honored and proud to be an invited plenary speaker at the 41st International Symposium on Combustion,” said Trouvé. “This was an opportunity for me to report on the problem of Wildland-Urban-Interface (WUI) and urban fires to the combustion science community. I hope that this will lead to better recognition of the importance of this problem and to new collaborations with our combustion colleagues.”

In late July in Kyoto, Japan, Trouvé addressed the meeting with a talk exploring the role of computational models in meeting the challenges of WUI and urban conflagrations. His plenary session was also featured in the “Fire Science Show” podcast. Listen to the episode below.

Below is an abstract of the talk.

Abstract: Large destructive fires are a growing concern for society. We focus in the present paper on WUI and urban “conflagrations” defined as spreading fires that propagate over large areas inside human communities. The problem of WUI/urban conflagrations is primarily a structure ignition problem. A basic understanding of this problem requires first a quantification of the thermal exposure experienced by solid surfaces (combustible and noncombustible) found in the vicinity or part of the external envelope of a target structure, and second a quantification of the response of these surfaces. We first start with a presentation of the fire engineering perspective that considers target structures in representative fire scenarios with the objectives to identify the heating pathways on the target surfaces, to quantify the thermal load, to uncover vulnerabilities and to explain how an outdoor fire can penetrate the envelope of the target structure and transition to an indoor fire. We then proceed to a discussion of the combustion science problems found in WUI/urban conflagrations. The underlying fundamental questions found in the problem of structure ignition are associated with the different mechanisms of forward heat transfer (i.e., radiative heat transfer, convective heat transfer, firebrands), the properties of the target fuels susceptible to thermal degradation (i.e., thermally-thin elements in vegetation fuels, thermally-thick surfaces in structure fuels), the different modes of ignition (i.e., smoldering ignition, piloted flaming ignition, flaming auto-ignition), and the different modes of combustion (i.e., flaming combustion, smoldering combustion, and transitions between both modes). We finally turn to a review of the role played by computational combustion in providing the tools required for understanding and quantifying the fire risk in WUI and urban communities. Among currently available computational models, one differentiates between: “structure fire solvers” that resolve indoor fire dynamics at single structure scales; “parcel fire solvers” that resolve outdoor fire dynamics at single or a few structures scales; and “WUI/urban conflagration solvers” that resolve outdoor fire dynamics at landscape/community scales. While structure and parcel fire solvers are based on classical approaches coming from Computational Fluid Dynamics, conflagration solvers are based on reduced-order models that must work at low spatial resolution. The development of conflagration solvers is a major research objective in the domain of WUI and urban fires as these solvers correspond to actionable tools that can be used by practitioners to quantify the fire risk. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges and limitations found in current WUI/urban conflagration solvers.

Published August 26, 2026