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Dr.
Vytenis (Vyto) Babrauskas
About
the Tutor:
Dr Babrauskas was the first person to ever
receive a Ph.D. degree in Fire Protection
Engineering. He headed the fire test method
development programs at NIST for 16 years
before becoming a consultant.
Vyto has taught graduate-level engineering
courses at the University of British Columbia
and at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has
given hundreds of lectures and presentations
and is the author of over 250 papers on fire
safety. He is the Author of the authortative
Ignition Handbook and Heat Release in Fire,
he is also the U.S. editor for Fire Safety
Journal.
In
recent years, he has been regularly teaching
classes to fire investigators on fire science
principles.
Further details from http://www.doctorfire.com |
THE COURSE AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
The course presents the unifying
principles to fire investigators, fire service
personnel, forensic engineers, insurance adjustors,
and other professionals interested in understanding
the causes of fires. At the completion of
this course, the attendee should be equipped
with a basic underst
anding of the mechanisms by which the third
leg of the fire triangle—“source
of heat”—can be caused by electric
current or static electricity. Attendees should
already have had some previous instruction
on the principles of electricity as only a
very brief review of the elementary principles
of electricity will be made.
Most
other courses on electrical fires available
to fire investigators (a) start at a very
basic level and run out of time before more
advanced topics can be covered; and (b) focus
primarily on examples of electrical fires,
and do not systematically develop the principles
that underlie all electrical fires. It is
the purpose of the present course to take
up where such courses leave off and it is
assumed that attendees already have some knowledge
of the more practical aspects of investigating
fires in electrical devices or appliances.
The first 2/3 of the course is devoted to
developing a good understanding of the principles
that underlie all electrical fires. The remainder
focuses on a variety of devices and appliances
that can undergo an electrical fire. This
is illustrated by color photos of failed devices,
and the participants will be given information
in the last portion of the course on how these
practical failures can be understood in terms
of the basic principles of electrical fires.
Existing
instructional materials for fire investigators
(e.g., Kirk’s Fire Investigation and
NFPA 921) address the lower level courses.
The technical source of the information that
will be given in the present course comes
from the Ignition Handbook (by Vytenis Babrauskas;
Fire Science Publishers, 2003), which is the
only reference currently available for these
advanced studies. During the course, the Handbook
will act as a reference source and will reduce
the need for extensive note-taking by the
participants. Consequently, attendees may
wish to procure a copy of the handbook for
that purpose. A handout will be provided to
cover additional, newer material.
The
knowledge gained in this seminar will then
allow interpretations of burn patterns to
be made that are consistent with the state
of the art of ignition theory, as it pertains
to electrical causes. |
