ABSTRACT
This chapter presents advances in scientific methods applied to fire cause and fire debris analysis, as well as emerging scientific methods that have application in these fields. It provides the information received from scientific journals and proceedings of major forensic conferences. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry is commonly used in the analysis of fire debris samples. Fire modelling has been gaining more and more interest within the community of forensic fire investigators. The model makes use of local combustion conditions to determine the yield of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons, soot and oxygen. The fire-induced airflow in a room-size compartment was simulated by Wang et al. They applied computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to model fires and the associated fundamental processes of combustion and radiation. CFD was applied because this technique allowed elimination of factors which were difficult to control in experiments, but would affect the plume movement.
