Thanks everybody for the hard work, it is truly impressive how much we have accomplished in such a short amount of time. There is an incredible number of instruments in various places throughout the fire lab and many of the instruments/chambers worked pretty well for the first fire and we already have some exciting data to discuss. There are certainly several issues to work on, but no big show stoppers at this point.

Many groups are spread out over various places in the building and it was difficult to communicate the fire ignition time to everybody today. Tomorrow we hopefully have the camera system set up, so that a live video feed will be available in every laboratory, which should solve that problem.

There was a lot of discussion about the fire size and fuel amount. Concentrations were too high for some groups and too low for others, mainly for the smog chamber. As Bob said, today’s burn was pretty close to perfect and should be considered a “typical burn.” The fire crew can change the size of the fuel bed and add/reduce canopy fuels pretty easily. So we should be able to dial in the right concentrations for various applications. We can make a larger fire for the smog chamber early in the day and smaller fires afterwards. A picture of todays fuel bed is attached.

Thanks again for working efficiently and collaboratively at the top of the stack. It is still difficult to get enough time on your instrument up there, so keep on using only the people you really need for the time that you really need. Once instruments work more smoothly, it should be possible for everybody to get the necessary access.

We are tentatively planning for an 11AM burn, but tomorrow we will delay if needed to get instruments ready.

Thanks for all of your hard work.