Our Firebrand team has been busy! We started off with interviewing a firefighter (appropriate since they are our main audience with this project) to understand the current technology and learn about their needs. We’ve also begun testing with a phone camera to give us a place to start. We’ve been using a heating rod as our standard heat source (to take the place of the firebrand), and we took its picture at different temperatures and to study the camera’s capabilities to capture differences. Sixteen pictures were taken with different shutter speeds for each ISO value. Temperature was measured using an IR thermometer gun. (That’s been another challenge–accurately measuring temperature). Using MATLAB, red, blue, and green channels were separated from the raw image. We plan to measure intensity of each channel for all pictures to calibrate the sensitivity of our CCD in our camera. For further measurement we will use ProCamera software and DigiCamControl to control the settings of the camera.

Our Chemical analysis team has been doing mostly research and learning the software. We dabbled a bit with CFAST, Matlab, Smokeview to see their capabilities to simulate a forest fire, but have decided to focus mostly on the capabilities of Chemkin. We’ve also been doing research in the factors that affect forest fires (i.e. humidity, slope, wind, ambient temperatures, etc.) by reading articles and journals on forest fires and burning biomass. We hope to implement these factors into our simulation on Chemkin, but the main feat we face now is becoming experts in Chemkin.