May 28, 2025

203 - The lessons from repeating Jin's experiment on visibility in smoke

203 - The lessons from repeating Jin's experiment on visibility in smoke
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203 - The lessons from repeating Jin's experiment on visibility in smoke

I've finally done it. We've repeated Jin's experiment! I thought I knew-it-all about that experiment, but boy... knowing and doing it are two different things. I can say, I've finally cleared my mind on some thoughts after this, which I am finally happy to share with all of you!

First things first, massive thanks to my partner in crime Wai-Kit Wilson Cheung, from the group of prof. Xinyan Huang, who was the man on the ground doing the experiments with me. Together we went further into this model, than ever before.

The revelations are far-reaching. We found that Jin used extraordinary lighting conditions—180 lux background brightness and impossibly bright signage—far from realistic building emergency conditions. Background brightness emerges as perhaps the most critical factor in determining what can be seen through smoke, with dramatic differences between light-emitting and light-reflecting signs. Most significantly, the experiment's careful constraint of sign size (using proportionally larger signs at greater distances) created elegant mathematics but removed a crucial real-world variable from the model.

These insights have profound implications. Engineers likely overestimate visibility in many scenarios, particularly with reflective signage. The widely used K-values (3 for reflective signs, 8 for light-emitting signs) appear reasonably conservative for typical building conditions, though higher values might be warranted in darker environments. Most provocatively, simply increasing sign size would almost certainly improve evacuation safety, yet our current models provide no mechanism to quantify this benefit.

Fire safety practitioners will find this episode transformative, offering both practical guidance and theoretical understanding. Should we stick with visibility distance or shift to smoke density as our primary metric? How can we balance lighting conditions to optimize visibility of both obstacles and signage? And most critically, how might next-generation visibility models better serve real-world building safety? These are things we currently work on.

If you look for reading, check the paper on the extinction coefficient by the German colleagues: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16182

If you strive for more podcast episodes:

The research was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, based on a contract for the implementation and financing of a research project OPUS LAP No 2020/39/I/ST8/03159 and by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under the project number 465392452 , for the joint project: “Visibility Prediction Framework – a next-generation model for visibility in smoke in built environment”.


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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

00:00 - Introduction to Visibility in Smoke

03:52 - What is Visibility in Smoke?

08:36 - Jin's Historical Experiments Explained

15:37 - Repeating Jin's Experiments Today

21:40 - Background Brightness: A Critical Variable

25:30 - Sign Size: The Overlooked Factor

31:42 - Light Reflecting vs Emitting Signs

39:38 - Engineering Implications and Future Research

42:05 - Conclusions and Design Considerations

WEBVTT

00:00:00.462 --> 00:00:02.508
Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

00:00:02.508 --> 00:00:09.233
Today we are talking visibility in smoke and if you follow the podcast, you know that this topic is very dear to my heart.

00:00:09.233 --> 00:00:19.969
It is something that I research on my own and that has been a very important part of my scientific career thus far and probably will be for ongoing years.

00:00:19.969 --> 00:00:25.524
Many years ago I've done an episode with Lucas Arnold about visibility prediction framework.

00:00:25.524 --> 00:00:36.896
Our new back then grant that we were just starting at that point that we hope that will allow us to revolutionize the way how visibility is assessed in fire safety engineering.

00:00:36.896 --> 00:00:44.173
This project is actually ongoing, but I finally have some findings that I can share with you and that makes me super happy.

00:00:44.173 --> 00:00:47.506
Have some findings that I can share with you and that makes me super happy.

00:00:47.527 --> 00:01:12.887
A year ago I have recorded an episode in the series I've called the experiments that changed fire science and in that episode I've covered experiments by Japanese scientist Jin, which are the basis of this model, and I said back then that Jin's model needs urgent repeat, that we really need to do it, and I knew we were going to repeat it because we've built the rig to do it, but shortly after that episode was published a very happy thing to me happened.

00:01:12.887 --> 00:01:28.605
I got a student from Hong Kong, Wai-Kit Wilson-Chung, from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, from Xinyan Huang's Wai-Kit, stayed with me for six months and he was really focused on doing those experiments.

00:01:28.605 --> 00:01:31.861
So, together with Waikid, we've actually redone the Jin's experiments.

00:01:31.861 --> 00:01:58.135
We've redone them, we've processed the data and today I am happy to show you some findings, because while I think I understood the Jin experiment and you can listen to that in the episode about Gene's experiments, why I think I knew what Gene done actually repeating those experiments, you know, doing that research on your own really opens your eyes on what is important in those experiments.

00:01:58.135 --> 00:02:03.668
And this is a broader reflection the papers don't tell you the full story.

00:02:03.668 --> 00:02:05.507
You need to talk to the scientists to tell you the full story.

00:02:05.507 --> 00:02:20.344
You need to talk to the scientist to really learn the full story what was hard, what was easy, where the challenges were, and I think we've narrowed down where the challenges of the visibility smoke model lie really, and this is what's gonna be said in this episode.

00:02:20.344 --> 00:02:24.112
I've presented this at the sfp, edinburgh.

00:02:24.112 --> 00:02:25.515
So finally, a time.

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This reaches also my dear fire science show audience.

00:02:28.764 --> 00:02:32.539
So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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Welcome to the fire science show.

00:02:38.584 --> 00:02:42.026
My name is vojtěj věkřínski and I will be your host.

00:02:42.026 --> 00:03:11.561
The FireSense show is into its third year of continued support from its sponsor of our Consultants, who are an independent, multi-award winning fire engineering consultancy with a reputation for delivering innovative safety-driven solutions.

00:03:11.561 --> 00:03:25.300
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00:03:25.300 --> 00:03:41.409
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00:03:41.409 --> 00:03:49.968
If you're keen to find out more or join OFR Consultants during this exciting period of growth, visit their website at ofrconsultantscom.

00:03:49.968 --> 00:03:52.074
And now back to the episode.

00:03:53.040 --> 00:04:02.481
So when I talk about visibility in smoke and recently I have a lot of chances to talk about this model I like to start with very difficult questions.

00:04:02.481 --> 00:04:04.622
Easy questions are always the most difficult to answer.

00:04:04.622 --> 00:04:07.865
What is visibility in smoke Like?

00:04:07.865 --> 00:04:09.945
What are we really talking about?

00:04:09.945 --> 00:04:19.591
Because, on one hand, you could consider it being a measure of a distance at which something can be observed.

00:04:19.591 --> 00:04:26.173
I think that would be the simplest, easiest definition of what visibility in smoke is.

00:04:26.173 --> 00:04:34.997
And this definition probably is right, but it has a lot of details in it, like what does it mean you can see something?

00:04:34.997 --> 00:04:39.588
Is it enough that you see a glimpse of light?

00:04:39.588 --> 00:04:41.680
Is it enough that you see a shape, a blurred out shape?

00:04:41.680 --> 00:04:47.723
Or you have to be able to process data that's shown on the thing that you're observing.

00:04:47.723 --> 00:04:57.050
How certain you have to be that the thing you observe is the thing that you observe, and those things change when the visibility changes.

00:04:57.692 --> 00:05:02.725
If you're a physicist, then perhaps this is ill-defined for you.

00:05:02.725 --> 00:05:07.595
Perhaps it's a distance at which the light can still pass through obscuring medium.

00:05:07.595 --> 00:05:21.629
So if you point a ray of light through smoke, fog, whatever aerosol that disturbs it, the light will start to decay, it will scatter to the sides, it will be absorbed by the particles.

00:05:21.629 --> 00:05:32.642
So with every meter you will have less and less light passing through, and if you capture the point at which the light has decayed completely, that's the point where you cannot see the light anymore.

00:05:32.642 --> 00:05:37.153
So perhaps this distance is visibility in smoke In some way.

00:05:37.153 --> 00:05:38.983
This is how we measure it.

00:05:38.983 --> 00:05:39.946
This is how we measure it.

00:05:39.946 --> 00:05:52.233
In laboratories we have densitometer, optical densitometers which emit light, which measure light, and they measure how much light is lost in between the emitter and the target.

00:05:52.233 --> 00:05:56.170
So a physicist could define visibility as such a distance.

00:05:56.701 --> 00:06:11.567
If you think about genes experiments the ones that brought us the visibility in smoke model that we use in fire science, visibility was actually the initial condition or actually the assumption of the study, the distance itself, the meters.

00:06:11.567 --> 00:06:25.158
So Jin built his facility in such a way that you could observe the science from either 5, 10, or 15 meters and in all honesty, we still have not found how he measured the 10 meter distance.

00:06:25.158 --> 00:06:32.458
But anyway, the rig is reported to be able to measure at 5, 10 and 15 meter distance.

00:06:32.458 --> 00:06:36.687
So it's discrete points in space rather than continuous spectrum.

00:06:36.687 --> 00:06:41.723
And in Gene's experiment the participant was placed at this distance.

00:06:41.723 --> 00:07:03.245
They were observing a light source through a smoke and they had a little widget that they could turn around and this widget would make the light dimmer and dimmer and they would just find the dimmest light they could see through the smoke and then Jin would save that data and use that in the further research.

00:07:03.245 --> 00:07:08.074
So in Jin's research the visibility is actually a fixed number.

00:07:08.074 --> 00:07:09.867
It's either 5, 10, or 15.

00:07:09.867 --> 00:07:12.569
There's no intermediate values for that.

00:07:12.569 --> 00:07:14.187
It's quite interesting when you think about it.

00:07:14.187 --> 00:07:25.329
If you're a firefighter, the visibility range would be something that's very natural to you, because that's the distance you can see in your fires, how far into the building, how far into the field you can see.

00:07:25.329 --> 00:07:37.531
So, perhaps closest to the first, most simple definition that I've brought up and allegedly, the observations of firefighters the distances they were saying are 10 meters is probably enough.

00:07:37.531 --> 00:07:44.923
Those were the background for creating the discrete values of visibility that we use today for engineering.

00:07:44.923 --> 00:07:47.964
But it does not mean the same thing for an engineer.

00:07:48.427 --> 00:07:55.387
If you're practicing fire safety engineering, you are not really assessing the ability to observe things through smoke.

00:07:55.387 --> 00:08:05.351
You're not assessing light decay in smoke and you're definitely not assessing the critical brightness of a widget that you can observe through smoke.

00:08:05.351 --> 00:08:10.307
No, you are applying a very simple mathematical correlation.

00:08:10.307 --> 00:08:14.641
In one part of the correlation you put smoke density in.

00:08:14.641 --> 00:08:17.588
How much smoke do you have in your space?

00:08:17.588 --> 00:08:22.461
And this is something you know from your CFD analysis, from your zone model analysis.

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You know your soot yields.

00:08:24.021 --> 00:08:25.483
You know your yields of combustion.

00:08:25.483 --> 00:08:29.464
You can calculate how much soot gets emitted to your room.

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You know the flows in your room, you can calculate how much smoke is there in any given part of my building while performing fire safety engineering.

00:08:42.812 --> 00:08:52.256
And when you do this fire safety engineering, you have to show those results to someone and you usually choose to present them as visibility in smoke.

00:08:52.256 --> 00:08:54.798
So I'll just give a quick recap.

00:08:54.798 --> 00:08:58.868
How does the smoke density turn into visibility in our modeling?

00:08:58.868 --> 00:09:00.592
Because it's a very simple correlation.

00:09:00.592 --> 00:09:23.243
You basically have a factor we call it large K usually and it takes values of 3 for light reflecting signs, 8 for light emitting signs I'll come back to this at the end of the episode and you basically subdivide it by your smoke density multiplied by specific extinction coefficient of smoke.

00:09:23.243 --> 00:09:30.410
The extinction coefficient is something we know from experimental work from Mulholland's and I'll also come back to this at the end of the episode.

00:09:31.059 --> 00:09:37.909
The logmock density you know from your CFD, and so you have all the things that you need to calculate visibility.

00:09:37.909 --> 00:09:45.446
Well, does this mean that you will be able to see for 10 meters in your building if you've calculated 10 meters visibility?

00:09:45.446 --> 00:09:46.470
Of course not.

00:09:46.470 --> 00:10:00.590
It just means that if an entire space was filled with a smoke of density, like you have in this one point of space that you've just measured, then probably in the whole room you would have visibility distance of something like 10 meters.

00:10:00.590 --> 00:10:06.842
That's pretty much what it says, but it doesn't tell you anything about what you can see, what you cannot see.

00:10:06.842 --> 00:10:17.600
It doesn't tell you anything about where the light will stop in your room and it definitely does not tell you at what kind of brightness you can observe things in your compartment.

00:10:17.600 --> 00:10:27.985
It just allows you to translate value that's perhaps a little less understandable the density of smoke into a value that people can understand visibility.

00:10:27.985 --> 00:10:38.113
That's the trick that has been used as the backbone of fire safety engineering for five decades now, I guess, and I cannot say we've been pretty successful with it.

00:10:38.113 --> 00:10:50.293
It's just that it's so profound, so impactful in our engineering that I really find it not great that we have such a coarse approximation that we use for very significant engineering decisions every day.

00:10:50.895 --> 00:10:57.472
So now let's talk a little bit about the story of repeating genes experiments, because it was a very interesting story.

00:10:57.472 --> 00:11:04.043
First we've done I thought I'm clever, you know I'm not gonna, you know use a widget to control the brightness.

00:11:04.043 --> 00:11:06.210
That just gives me one point of data.

00:11:06.210 --> 00:11:13.374
I am a clever scientist and I figured out a way how I can get much more data from the same experiment.

00:11:13.374 --> 00:11:20.688
So in my experiment, contrary to Jin's, I have a huge LED screens at the back of my experiment.

00:11:20.688 --> 00:11:35.201
Jin certainly did not have those in 1970s and instead of projecting one sign, I can project as many as I want and I can make them dimmer and dimmer, and dimmer and control this through my software.

00:11:35.201 --> 00:11:45.765
So when Gene was able to project one sign on his frosted glass, I am capable of projecting however much the hell I want.

00:11:45.765 --> 00:11:47.270
So I definitely did that.

00:11:47.311 --> 00:11:55.456
I did that with my student Pavel, and we were trying to do those signs emitted on a screen of TV and replicate Gene's experiment.

00:11:55.456 --> 00:12:04.043
And in Gene's experiment there is this one way he's presenting results and it's called the dimensionless brightness.

00:12:04.043 --> 00:12:08.360
It's not very useful but it's kind of relevant, so I'll talk you through.

00:12:08.360 --> 00:12:14.466
So dimensionless brightness is that Gene took the brightness of the sign that he was projecting.

00:12:14.466 --> 00:12:25.508
He was measuring that with pretty complicated optical measurements that I cover in the previous podcast episode and he was subdividing that by the brightness of the background.

00:12:25.508 --> 00:12:30.586
So if the dimensionless brightness is above one, that means the sign was brighter than the background.

00:12:30.586 --> 00:12:39.726
If the dimensionless brightness is less than one, it means that the sign was darker than the background and the higher the value, the brighter the sign right.

00:12:39.726 --> 00:12:55.606
So with Paavo we start to calculating dimensionless brightness for our results and we very quickly see that we're nowhere close to Gene's results, like we are nowhere close to the range of dimensionless brightness that Gene's used.

00:12:55.875 --> 00:13:05.256
Our TV is not bright enough, and that was the first shocker because I felt the TVs, the setup that we've built, was imitating the building conditions fairly well.

00:13:05.256 --> 00:13:06.921
I've been in a lot of buildings.

00:13:06.921 --> 00:13:12.080
I've been in a lot of buildings in fires, actually, because we're doing those fire tests in them.

00:13:12.080 --> 00:13:19.605
So I know how evacuation routes in a building in emergency lighting in your evacuation conditions should look like.

00:13:19.605 --> 00:13:31.004
I have a pretty good idea of that and I thought my tvs are fairly well representative of that environment, whereas now we see that we're nowhere close to jeans results.

00:13:31.004 --> 00:13:33.509
That was quite a shocker to us.

00:13:33.811 --> 00:13:46.054
And then wiki chunk came and the first job I gave gave to Wilson was to build me a light emitting source that could match gins and boy, that was a journey.

00:13:46.054 --> 00:13:52.227
We've 3D printed the box and the box was lined up with light reflecting foil.

00:13:52.227 --> 00:13:58.826
Then we've put a bunch of LEDs into the box, like it took us like five iterations of adding more and more and more and more and more LEDs into the box.

00:13:58.826 --> 00:14:04.503
Like it took us like five iterations of adding more and more and more and more and more LEDs to the box until we've reached the box.

00:14:04.503 --> 00:14:13.442
That's like literally, you know, a lighthouse lantern you cannot look straight into the box because it blinds you for like 30 seconds.

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That's how bright it is.

00:14:14.899 --> 00:14:16.441
And now we match Jin's.

00:14:16.441 --> 00:14:20.524
And now we match the Jin's frosted glass brightness.

00:14:21.235 --> 00:14:24.326
And this was like a shocker, but also an eye-opener.

00:14:24.326 --> 00:14:37.006
Like Jin has used extremely bright sources in their experiments, extremely bright sources, and therefore he could observe those signs through very, very dense smoke.

00:14:37.006 --> 00:14:46.144
If you look at Jin's experiments closely, you'll notice that the ranges of extinction coefficients that Jin is working with they're reaching up to two.

00:14:46.144 --> 00:14:48.724
This is unbelievably dense smoke.

00:14:48.724 --> 00:14:54.664
This is a smoke at which you will not see your hand if you stretch it in front of you.

00:14:54.664 --> 00:14:58.586
You probably will not even see your elbow in smoke of this density.

00:14:58.586 --> 00:15:05.835
It's unbelievably dense smoke and he was carrying observations and calculating those models in such dense smoke conditions.

00:15:05.835 --> 00:15:15.501
So, ah, this is already something that moves Jin's experiments away from the space of real buildings, real engineering.

00:15:15.501 --> 00:15:18.263
The sources are too bright, the smoke is too dense.

00:15:18.263 --> 00:15:25.636
It's not something that we commonly work as fire safety engineers and again, you can read the paper as many times as you like.

00:15:25.697 --> 00:15:41.220
You can, you know, spend ages on studying what has been done in Japan in 1970s, but it really took us to repeat the experiment to very quickly realize what we are dealing with with those light sources.

00:15:41.220 --> 00:15:53.506
Very interesting, and therefore I find this podcast episode of real value, because previously I was speaking about what I think the problems with genes experiments are.

00:15:53.506 --> 00:15:56.224
Now I know what they are because I've run into them.

00:15:56.224 --> 00:16:00.505
But that's not everything that we've realized while repeating Jin's experiments.

00:16:00.505 --> 00:16:05.923
Actually, we've learned a lot more with Wilson, so let's try digesting that.

00:16:07.296 --> 00:16:42.605
When Jin was doing his experiments, the profound finding in his study and I think that's the biggest discovery of Jin really was that the relationship between the extinction coefficient and the distance at which you can observe the sign is fairly constant across a range of sign sizes, distances, background brightness and just the brightness of the sign, which meant that he could collapse a lot of results into straight lines and just find a linear correlation between the variables, therefore creating the model that we are currently using.

00:16:42.605 --> 00:16:44.100
I'm not sure he was creating a model.

00:16:44.100 --> 00:16:51.822
Actually I think he was just looking for a relationship that allows his engineering to be done, whereas we turned it into the model.

00:16:51.822 --> 00:16:58.086
We, as a collective fire safety engineering community, we've started using this as a model to predict visibility.

00:16:58.086 --> 00:17:06.837
He was just representing the outcomes, I think, but anyway, in his experiments he was doing them with different range of lights with different sizes.

00:17:06.837 --> 00:17:23.184
As I said, he was also using dimensionless brightness of a sign to reduce the number of variables in the studies and he was able to actually collapse those results into one very elegant line and I think you can see this plot in sfp handbook.

00:17:23.184 --> 00:17:28.461
We'll see if it's there in the next edition of handbook which is released just in a few days.

00:17:28.461 --> 00:17:31.406
But he was basically able to simplify this a lot.

00:17:31.907 --> 00:17:34.721
Now we've repeated this experiment as closely as we could.

00:17:34.721 --> 00:17:53.957
We really paid a lot of attention to repeat these experiments as closely, as accurately as we could, following whatever is being said in Jun's papers and our results, while they do keep this linear relationship between brightness and extinction coefficient at which you can observe the sign.

00:17:53.957 --> 00:17:59.954
So in some way we confirm that there is this close linear relationship.

00:17:59.954 --> 00:18:01.280
That's the basis of the model.

00:18:01.280 --> 00:18:04.144
That's, I think, a very good finding that we confirmed that.

00:18:04.144 --> 00:18:10.628
Besides that we have not been able to collapse them this elegantly as Jin did.

00:18:10.628 --> 00:18:14.105
So our results just do not collapse that easy.

00:18:14.105 --> 00:18:17.965
They do not collapse that perfectly, and we were looking into why would they not collapse that perfectly?

00:18:17.965 --> 00:18:18.589
And we were looking into why.

00:18:18.589 --> 00:18:20.196
Why would they not collapse that perfectly?

00:18:20.196 --> 00:18:28.157
And we started thinking it could be related to the background conditions, to the background brightness.

00:18:28.157 --> 00:18:43.281
We've used led strips in the in the room so we had a very nice uniform brightness across the room, jim using incandescent lights which he was turning on and off, so he definitely had non-uniform light distribution.

00:18:43.281 --> 00:18:57.722
But as we were looking into that, we realized that perhaps there's a bigger story to be told about the brightness which is not told by Jin and which I think the fire safety community needs to know and understand.

00:18:57.722 --> 00:18:59.787
So what I mean by that?

00:19:00.048 --> 00:19:13.288
If you look at the perhaps most influential graph of all of them in Gene's papers, there's a graph that shows you on the y-axis, the dimensionless number which is smoke density multiplied by visibility.

00:19:13.288 --> 00:19:17.319
On the x-axis, the dimensionless brightness of your sign.

00:19:17.319 --> 00:19:27.144
And in this plot this plot basically, is the basis for the values of k3 and 8, really, that's the original of those values.

00:19:27.144 --> 00:19:30.055
And why it's important?

00:19:30.055 --> 00:19:37.506
Because we've noticed that in the top left-hand of the plot there's a note external light 180 lux.

00:19:37.506 --> 00:19:42.666
Gene has carried his experiments in extremely bright conditions.

00:19:42.666 --> 00:19:50.808
180 lux is not something you normally have in your buildings in the evacuation phase.

00:19:50.808 --> 00:19:59.327
In Poland the minimum is one lux, of course, but in normal buildings like 100 is already a lot, really really a lot.

00:19:59.327 --> 00:20:07.086
180 is a very, very, very bright room and you normally do not evacuate through spaces with such an immense brightness.

00:20:07.086 --> 00:20:10.884
And why I say there's a story to be told about brightness.

00:20:11.476 --> 00:20:38.107
As soon as you go into the laboratory, as soon as you start repeating those experiments, as soon as you start playing with that, you immediately notice how impactful the background brightness is, how important is the brightness of the environment in which the evacuation takes place and how quickly it changes the ability to see or not see the evacuation signage.

00:20:38.107 --> 00:20:48.344
We had experiments in which you would set a brightness of a sign and at some external brightness you would not see even a glimpse of the sign.

00:20:48.344 --> 00:20:52.561
And if you tune the brightness down, you would see the sign perfectly.

00:20:52.561 --> 00:20:56.561
The same smoke, the same sign, just changing the background conditions.

00:20:56.561 --> 00:21:04.144
This is how big impact the brightness of the environment can have on visibility and actually it makes sense.

00:21:04.144 --> 00:21:05.226
It makes perfect sense.

00:21:05.226 --> 00:21:12.708
So if you have a scattering medium in your space, like smoke is, you can think about it.

00:21:12.708 --> 00:21:16.479
It's an averaging filter of light that's going through the room.

00:21:16.479 --> 00:21:23.328
Basically, all the light that passes through that scattering medium bounces off particles, let's say mixes.

00:21:23.328 --> 00:21:35.521
I'm not sure if it's a good word to be used about physics of light, but let's say that the light from different sources mixes and that's why your eyes cannot tell those lights apart, because they're mixed.

00:21:36.143 --> 00:21:39.827
Now you will also see the brighter thing.

00:21:39.827 --> 00:21:46.546
If you have a very bright point next to not such a bright point, you of course see the brighter point first.

00:21:46.546 --> 00:21:58.506
So the sign has to be more bright than the background, and the bigger the difference between the background and the sign is, the easier it's going to be to observe the sign.

00:21:58.506 --> 00:22:00.277
I think that that's quite reasonable.

00:22:00.277 --> 00:22:05.407
Now your signs have a very specific light intensity that they emit.

00:22:05.407 --> 00:22:06.876
It's in their characteristic.

00:22:06.876 --> 00:22:13.698
Therefore, if your background is too bright, you cannot increase the brightness of your signs anymore.

00:22:13.698 --> 00:22:16.522
You will start losing visibility of those signs.

00:22:16.522 --> 00:22:19.728
And, trust me, if you go into the experiment.

00:22:19.728 --> 00:22:28.224
If you go into the laboratory, if you start observing those signs through the glass, and if you're ever in Warsaw, you're very welcome to come to my laboratory.

00:22:28.224 --> 00:22:35.105
I'll show it to you you will notice that the change in the background brightness perhaps has the most profound impact on the outcomes of the study.

00:22:35.595 --> 00:22:41.904
And now, why it's important for fire safety engineering is because of that assumption of Gin's model 180 lux.

00:22:41.904 --> 00:22:44.131
We're not really having 180 lux.

00:22:44.131 --> 00:23:14.501
So therefore, with Wilson, we've tried to create this collapse of results for lower brightnesses to see, because Gin doesn't present a graph like that We've tried to collapse the results for different brightness conditions and for a brightness level of 22 lux or 1 lux I think very reasonable for normal evacuation conditions, we go with K values up to 11.

00:23:14.501 --> 00:23:20.576
That's much higher than Jin did and we generally observe very high k values for those conditions.

00:23:20.576 --> 00:23:29.917
Therefore, reassuring me, in my everyday practice I simply use this k value of 8 as the baseline in my engineering.

00:23:29.917 --> 00:23:32.563
I very rarely engineer for k value of 3.

00:23:32.563 --> 00:23:41.674
And I reassured myself that using high k values is actually more representative of built environment and that's one finding.

00:23:41.674 --> 00:24:00.161
Probably, if you do engineering on that and you go into third party audit, you probably should not quote a podcast on that, but I promise you there's a paper to be submitted very soon and as soon as the paper is published I'll put the link in the show notes and then you will have a peer-reviewed, credible source to quote.

00:24:00.161 --> 00:24:07.042
So I hope I give it to you, my fellow FISA engineer, so you have less troubles in your work.

00:24:07.042 --> 00:24:09.502
But anyway, to summarize, the brightness.

00:24:09.502 --> 00:24:21.780
Brightness is extremely impactful and it seems that higher K values correspond to brightness levels in buildings which are more in line of what we observe in everyday life.

00:24:21.780 --> 00:24:25.750
So that's one reassuring thing and really wow.

00:24:25.750 --> 00:24:32.955
We need to study it more because it's really interesting how much the background brightness changes the outcomes of the experiment.

00:24:32.955 --> 00:24:40.970
But this is not the only obvious thing that we knew about Jin's experiment that we did not put enough emphasis on previously.

00:24:41.476 --> 00:24:43.904
The next one is the sign sizing.

00:24:43.904 --> 00:24:55.467
I've mentioned it already in the Jin's experiment podcast episode and I've actually re-listened to the episode and I found ah, I've talked about it but I did not really recognize the impact of that the sign signage.

00:24:55.467 --> 00:25:07.247
So, as I told you, Gene was observing signs from 5, 10, or 15 meters, but he somehow did not want the sign's size to influence the results of the study.

00:25:07.247 --> 00:25:11.000
Therefore he also used signs of different sizes.

00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:18.301
So when he was observing sign from 5 meters, the sign dimension was 5 centimeters.

00:25:18.301 --> 00:25:21.618
When he was observing it from 10 meters, it was 10 centimeters.

00:25:21.618 --> 00:25:24.527
When he was observing it from 15 meters, it was 15 centimeters.

00:25:24.527 --> 00:25:34.039
So the further he was, the bigger the sign was and now, as you can imagine, it has profound impact on the outcomes.

00:25:34.240 --> 00:25:42.099
Profound, of course, in real building, if you are further away from the thing, you observe, the thing looks smaller.

00:25:42.099 --> 00:25:46.856
The smaller it is, the harder it is to observe it through obscuring mediums such as smoke.

00:25:46.856 --> 00:25:52.256
In jinn's experiment the signs were always the same size no matter what distance you observe them.

00:25:52.256 --> 00:26:04.310
So he was really looking into ability to see the light from the source and not really observe a real evacuation signage in a real evacuation scenario.

00:26:04.310 --> 00:26:10.627
And as soon as you go into the lab and you start observing those signs, you immediately see that.

00:26:10.627 --> 00:26:12.722
So our setup has multiple mirrors.

00:26:12.722 --> 00:26:16.806
You can observe the signs from different distances at the same time, really.

00:26:16.806 --> 00:26:22.126
So you can really narrow the time at which you see the sign at 10 meters.

00:26:22.126 --> 00:26:25.874
You see the sign at 5 meters, you cannot see it at 15.

00:26:25.874 --> 00:26:26.960
Or, even better.

00:26:26.960 --> 00:26:29.943
You see it perfectly in 5 meters.

00:26:29.943 --> 00:26:35.781
You almost lose the visibility of it at 10 meters and you cannot see it at all at 15.

00:26:35.781 --> 00:26:37.681
That's probably a better description.

00:26:37.681 --> 00:26:53.484
So yeah, in our case we're able to see those differences and we've took the measurements and it's going to be another paper that's in production with Wilson, which is how much does the size of the sign change the outcomes of the experiment?

00:26:53.484 --> 00:27:03.825
But it's just important to know that in Gene's experiment that was constrained and I think this has really considerable impact on our ability to engineer.

00:27:03.825 --> 00:27:06.229
I think this has really considerable impact on our ability to engineer.

00:27:06.249 --> 00:27:11.638
I always felt it a lackluster that I cannot do any engineering with my science.

00:27:11.638 --> 00:27:21.711
Like, I go into a building, I do my CFD simulations, I do some smoke, I measure the visibility, of course, and I find the reason of visibility.

00:27:21.711 --> 00:27:23.075
Let's say, 9 meters.

00:27:23.075 --> 00:27:32.948
That's the outcome and my HAJ is very unhappy because it was supposed to be above 10 meters and I don't meet my tenability criterion.

00:27:32.948 --> 00:27:49.957
So I have to put a lot of extraction in that room to increase the my capability of removing smoke, to decrease the smoke density, to improve the visibility conditions, and then my building is considered safe because I finally have more than 10 meters visibility.

00:27:50.444 --> 00:27:58.955
But if, instead of placing another fan, I could just put twice the size evacuation signage, would that help In real engineering scenario?

00:27:58.955 --> 00:27:59.861
It definitely would help.

00:27:59.861 --> 00:28:02.536
It would be a difference in fire safety engineering if I could just use a larger signs in my experiments.

00:28:02.536 --> 00:28:07.010
It would be a difference in fire safety engineering if I could just use a larger science in my experiments.

00:28:07.010 --> 00:28:09.035
It would make a big, big difference.

00:28:09.656 --> 00:28:12.589
But with Jin's model it does not recognize the size of the sign.

00:28:12.589 --> 00:28:24.880
Therefore it's impossible to use that, as you know, your design variable and unfortunately I do not think there is an easy way how this could be implemented in Jin's method.

00:28:24.880 --> 00:28:30.184
The reason is that the results collapse into a line because the size is constrained.

00:28:30.184 --> 00:28:36.679
As soon as you remove the size constraint from those relationships, they do not collapse into a line anymore.

00:28:36.679 --> 00:28:41.176
And if there is an empirical relationship, it's going to be very complicated.

00:28:41.176 --> 00:28:48.858
So it's going to be extreme challenge for us to have a model that would include for the sign size in it.

00:28:48.858 --> 00:28:59.204
I'm not saying we're not trying, but it's very hard and I think it's a flow of genes model that we probably will not be able to go over.

00:28:59.806 --> 00:29:31.119
However, what I want to say is that I think in many documents in which fire engineer has ability to use their knowledge for their benefits, it's fairly fair to say in my building, in order to improve the evacuation conditions, I have doubled the size of the evacuation signage, therefore making them more observable from larger distances, therefore making them more observable from larger distances, and just put a claim that the existing visibility in smoke model does not account for size of the signage.

00:29:31.119 --> 00:29:35.382
Therefore, using larger signage is conservative versus the normal approach.

00:29:35.382 --> 00:29:38.123
I think that that's highly justifiable.

00:29:38.123 --> 00:29:48.877
Even though you cannot quantitatively tell how big the difference is, it's obvious that the larger size will be easier visible from larger distances.

00:29:48.877 --> 00:30:00.748
And actually, the second thing is that if you ever use Jin's model to assess visibility from distances higher than, let's say, 10-15 meters, I would say 15 is already questionable.

00:30:00.748 --> 00:30:02.010
I would not use it.

00:30:02.010 --> 00:30:06.759
Like tenability distance 10 meters, yeah, okay, fine, we can use it.

00:30:06.759 --> 00:30:32.036
But if you are interested in visibilities of 30, 50, 100 meters, let's say you're designing a runway for an airport or you're designing a traffic system or something else, perhaps using larger values of visibility that are far away from Jin's experiment, that would mean that the signs observed are absurdly large, it makes no sense and I would not extrapolate into distance for sure.

00:30:32.384 --> 00:30:41.194
And the third very challenging thing that we found about Jin's experiments and this is something I do not fully understand yet is how he has considered the light reflecting signs.

00:30:41.194 --> 00:30:53.826
So, as I mentioned before, you have this dimensionless brightness how much brighter or dimmer the sign is than your background and now you have your light reflecting signs.

00:30:53.826 --> 00:31:06.942
For light reflecting signs, by definition, your value cannot be larger than one, Like your sign cannot reflect more light than the background.

00:31:06.942 --> 00:31:13.634
And the dimensionless brightness, in my opinion, will be reflectance of the sign.

00:31:13.634 --> 00:31:14.826
That's it Like.

00:31:14.826 --> 00:31:21.071
It's impossible for the signage to have a higher value than the reflectance In smoke.

00:31:21.071 --> 00:31:29.657
It could even have a lower value because the light has to reach the sign and it's already obscured on its way from the background to the sign to be reflected.

00:31:29.657 --> 00:31:33.532
Therefore, this will be probably even lower than the reflectance.

00:31:33.532 --> 00:31:50.717
But in general you cannot have value larger than one and indeed in Gene's model he does not show any results for value higher than one, but it doesn't stop the line to cross that point, you know, and there are like extrapolations for values between one and two.

00:31:51.626 --> 00:31:55.717
The second thing is, when you have those light reflecting signs.

00:31:55.717 --> 00:32:09.192
You really do start losing the ability to see them very quickly and this is something that we start having a little bit different results than gin, extremely scattered results, I would say.

00:32:09.192 --> 00:32:18.537
It's space in which, especially in darker conditions, it's really challenging to observe those light-reflecting signs.

00:32:18.537 --> 00:32:28.898
And we're also looking into photoluminescent signs, which are of interest to us because it's a common technology used in my country for almost all of your evacuation signage.

00:32:28.898 --> 00:32:32.134
So we start to see different results.

00:32:32.134 --> 00:32:48.974
Perhaps we also get results that could match Jin's observations, but in this case we had five observers, so it was us the researchers, but five different people, and the differences between us are profound in this regime.

00:32:48.974 --> 00:32:55.178
So it's very, very hard to create a good universal model for that.

00:32:55.178 --> 00:33:00.738
For the light-emitting science, for the very bright science, we found good agreement between us.

00:33:00.738 --> 00:33:06.377
It was actually much more reasonable to approximate among the population.

00:33:06.904 --> 00:33:12.738
But for light reflecting science, this is like way, way, way more difficult than I thought it's going to be.

00:33:12.738 --> 00:33:16.895
It's a part of the paper that we really struggled to write.

00:33:16.895 --> 00:33:21.010
And also the ability to see those signs.

00:33:21.010 --> 00:33:30.856
You lose it at very low obscuration densities of your smoke and also you lose them at very low background lighting.

00:33:30.856 --> 00:33:35.596
There are background conditions that you don't even need smoke and you still cannot see the signs.

00:33:35.596 --> 00:33:48.036
So definitely this part of the model is probably way more complicated than a simple relationship brought by Jin and probably very difficult to use in real-world engineering.

00:33:48.424 --> 00:34:00.251
What, for me, is even more challenging is that Jin has made a claim that you could use this approach to distinguish the presence of solid boundaries like walls, columns, doors etc.

00:34:00.251 --> 00:34:07.090
And many engineers practice it like that, and for me this is very questionable because the size will matter a lot.

00:34:07.090 --> 00:34:19.152
Like I mentioned before, the size of the sign will really influence the outcomes of the observation, and if we're talking about a column or a door, they are enormous compared to a little placard of an evacuation sign.

00:34:19.152 --> 00:34:26.753
Therefore, I struggle to say that you can use the same rule applied to both of those and have the same results as your outcome.

00:34:26.753 --> 00:34:34.856
The other thing is the brightness of the background plays a lot of role and in this case, the brighter the background, the better the visibility of the signage.

00:34:34.856 --> 00:34:39.456
So you can see we come into some sort of competing objective.

00:34:39.965 --> 00:34:54.648
If you want your backlit evacuation signs to be best visible, you would like to have as dark environment as possible, because that allows you to see the backlit, the self-illuminated signs in the best way.

00:34:54.648 --> 00:35:03.170
If you want your reflecting signs to be visible, you probably want the brighter environment, as bright as possible.

00:35:03.170 --> 00:35:06.617
Only the brightest environment will allow you to see those.

00:35:06.617 --> 00:35:13.817
And if you want to look at your photoluminescence signs, you probably want as dark as possible, because any light will overshadow them.

00:35:13.817 --> 00:35:19.297
So it's a challenging engineering environment in which you have to make choices.

00:35:19.297 --> 00:35:25.005
Should my evacuation emergency lighting conditions be very bright or should they be dim?

00:35:25.005 --> 00:35:30.260
Is there the perfect point at which you get the most of both worlds?

00:35:30.260 --> 00:35:30.902
I'm not sure.

00:35:30.902 --> 00:35:32.166
Probably there is.

00:35:32.166 --> 00:35:34.614
Maybe between 30 and 60 looks.

00:35:34.614 --> 00:35:47.309
Probably somewhere around there you get the perfect point where you still have a great visibility of your emergency lighting and still sufficient visibility of your obstacles and reflecting signs.

00:35:47.550 --> 00:35:49.132
Again, don't quote me on that.

00:35:49.132 --> 00:35:58.425
I still have to write this into a peer-reviewed paper and if it comes out of a journal, then you're very welcome to quote me on that.

00:35:58.425 --> 00:36:05.119
But it's just my feelings and it's really funny that you study a thing for so many years.

00:36:05.119 --> 00:36:08.153
I studied visibility for at least 10 years.

00:36:08.153 --> 00:36:08.414
Now.

00:36:08.414 --> 00:36:27.306
I think I've started studying visibility in 2015, which would make it 10 years of research and I've read Jin's papers countless number of times and yet it took me to repeat the experiments with Wilson to really understand the challenges in that model.

00:36:27.306 --> 00:36:37.240
So to recap that, because I'm babbling for a long time already and I'm not sure if you're getting any value out of that, recap Brightness, background by brightness.

00:36:37.382 --> 00:36:41.652
This is a critical condition in assessing visibility in your buildings.

00:36:41.652 --> 00:37:00.735
Gin, the relationship that you know and that you use in your engineering, assumed 180 lux in the background, which is enormously high, and usually in your building you would have less and that also means that the K factors in darker buildings are larger.

00:37:00.735 --> 00:37:07.135
So you probably are on the safe side if you're already engineering for K values around 8.

00:37:07.135 --> 00:37:20.677
You probably could even increase that number if you know your background conditions and we are working very hard to provide you a quotable item on how much you can increase that and what space you can play with.

00:37:20.677 --> 00:37:31.577
But it seems reasonable that our buildings are a little darker than Jin's experiments and the visibility in those buildings should be a little better than what's predicted.

00:37:31.577 --> 00:37:32.398
That's good news.

00:37:32.398 --> 00:37:43.577
Second news is that the sign size was constrained in Jin's model, which makes the model not as directly useful as we hope it to be.

00:37:43.577 --> 00:37:57.880
We are looking for a solution, which I do not have right now, but I think it's highly justifiable to use larger signs in your fire safety engineering as a measure to increase safety in your buildings.

00:37:57.880 --> 00:38:04.757
I am 100% convinced that if you use larger evacuation signage, you improve safety of your buildings.

00:38:05.304 --> 00:38:10.918
The third thing is the reflectance of the light reflecting signs.

00:38:10.918 --> 00:38:20.532
This is something that's going to dictate their performance and the performance is lost very quickly in almost any smoke, probably even worse than in Jin's model.

00:38:20.532 --> 00:38:36.376
So beware, those signs in smoke will not really work well and you, if you have conditions in which you have smoke on your evacuation routes, you really should use the backlit signs, because those are the ones that will be visible in smoke conditions.

00:38:36.376 --> 00:38:42.552
I've also mentioned Mulholland's specific smoke extinction coefficient.

00:38:42.552 --> 00:39:01.614
There's a default value of 8.7 square meters per gram, I believe, and this value is being default used in FDS and my colleagues from Germany, the ones that I'm doing project with Christine Berger, professor Lukas Arnold, alexander Belt and Christoph Gnendiga and Tolsten Schutze.

00:39:01.614 --> 00:39:07.217
Together they found some new ways to measure extinction coefficients from aerosols that are very interesting.

00:39:07.217 --> 00:39:08.985
I'll link the paper in the show notes.

00:39:08.985 --> 00:39:15.413
They show largely different values than the ones reported by Mulholland, so it's also something we need to take in mind.

00:39:16.144 --> 00:39:20.036
So where do we go ahead with this in fire safety engineering?

00:39:20.036 --> 00:39:34.114
One thing that is obvious is that the existing model whether it's wrong or not, it definitely allowed us to engineer buildings that would be considered safe, and I do not question that I've been asked.

00:39:34.114 --> 00:39:35.369
So what do we do now?

00:39:35.369 --> 00:39:37.132
Do we cancel the visibility in smoke model?

00:39:37.132 --> 00:39:38.891
No, we cannot cancel it.

00:39:38.891 --> 00:39:43.793
We use it in like 93% of our projects as the tenability criterion.

00:39:43.793 --> 00:39:45.893
It's too impactful to be canceled.

00:39:45.893 --> 00:39:50.215
We need to use it, but we need to find a smart way to use it better.

00:39:50.215 --> 00:39:55.527
Therefore, I still think it's a useful tool In my engineering.

00:39:55.586 --> 00:40:13.405
A long time ago, I've moved away from visibility in smoke and I started using smoke density as the measure of my tenability using smoke density as the measure of my tenability, and I like this approach much better because it just works on raw data from CFD that I get smoke densities what I do get from my CFD.

00:40:13.405 --> 00:40:16.291
Therefore, I like to work with smoke density directly.

00:40:16.291 --> 00:40:31.496
But I think at this point the model while I feel it's a bit wrong in the spaces that I've described in this episode it plays an important role in modern engineering and still can be used.

00:40:31.496 --> 00:40:35.190
I'm really looking into possibility to modify it.

00:40:35.190 --> 00:40:42.588
Perhaps due to the sign problem it's not not possible to just simply, you know, find a new k value and be done with it.

00:40:42.588 --> 00:40:47.318
Perhaps there is more engineering to be done to have the model work.

00:40:47.318 --> 00:40:49.954
But if there is a way we will find one.

00:40:49.954 --> 00:40:54.637
And we're also working on a new generation of visibility in smoke models.

00:40:54.637 --> 00:41:02.873
Our friends at Wuppertal are having great progress in numerical modeling smoke and optical properties of smoke.

00:41:02.873 --> 00:41:18.947
I'm super excited for the work from Lucas Arnold's group on this and we're working together to find new relationships, new models and new ways to engineer fire safe buildings with visibility in mind, and visibility understood as ability to see objects through smoke.

00:41:18.947 --> 00:41:21.012
So that's for the future.

00:41:22.074 --> 00:41:23.235
Think I will stop here.

00:41:23.235 --> 00:41:26.067
That would be it for today's fire science show episode.

00:41:26.067 --> 00:41:31.184
Thank you for being here with me again listening to my rambling about visibility in smoke.

00:41:31.184 --> 00:41:38.929
I hope this time I've made it remotely useful to you and brought you some opinions of my own that will help you guide your engineering.

00:41:38.929 --> 00:41:47.295
Let's call them design considerations I love how FSRI calls their recommendations to firefighters and the considerations.

00:41:47.295 --> 00:41:56.114
So I gave you some visibility in smoke considerations that, whatever you do with them, it's yours, but I hope they're useful in your engineering.

00:41:56.114 --> 00:42:01.994
Thanks for being here with me in the Fast Science Show and I'm looking forward to see you here next Wednesday.

00:42:01.994 --> 00:42:02.945
Cheers, bye, bye.