Labs for Functional Textiles and Protective Clothing

"Characterization of Smoke Emissions from Wood and Plastic Combustion Under Controlled Conditions," a new article published in fire, provides a new methodology for reproducible and sustainable smoke simulation and findings that can help with exposure assessment to align equipment needs and operation strategies. Congratulations to the authors - Yulin Wu, Rui Li, Mengying Zhang, Jiaxin Shi, Fan Zhou, Mazyar Etemadzadeh, Md Jakir Hossain, Md Jalal Uddin Rumi, and Guowen Song - for leading this important work.

Find their full work here:

Characterization of Smoke Emissions from Wood and Plastic Combustion Under Controlled Conditions Fire smoke, rich in toxic ultrafine particles and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), poses significant health risks to first responders and vulnerable populations. In this study, a reproducible combustion–smoke simulation platform was developed to mechanistically quantify fire behavior, part...

Thank you to the Illinois Fire Service Institute and the Fire Service Women of Illinois for giving us the time and space to share our research with them!

On October 17th and 18th, researchers from ISU's NexGenPPT (Dr. Mengying Zhang, Dr. Rui Li, Yulin Wu, Mehmet Sefer, Fan Zhou, and Leslee Weible) and the University of Minnesota's Human Dimensioning Lab (Kyurey Park and Juan Angulo) were able to interact with women firefighters and talk about the research being done at both universities as well as invite them to participate using our newly developed app (see our funded research AI-SAFEHAND for more details) and through having their hands scanned.

Congrats to Md Jalal Uddin Rumi, Yulin Wu, Dr. Mengying Zhang, Dr. Rui Li, and Dr. Guowen Song for their new review article "Invisible hazards of ultrafine particles (UFPs) from Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fire smoke as emerging public health risks: A critical review of transformation dynamics from emission sources, exposure pathways, and vulnerable population to WUI fire toxicants" in Science of The Total Environment! Below is the abstract for their article, if you would like to read the full article follow the link at the bottom of this post.

Objective: This review synthesizes atmospheric chemistry, toxicology, and environmental justice to assess public health risks from ultrafine particles (UFPs,