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As summer turns to fall, wildfires continue to scorch forests and threaten communities in our state. The Wapiti Fire forced evacuations in and around Stanley and has already burned more than 112,000 acres in the Boise and Sawtooth National Forests.
A team of University of Idaho faculty and students is exploring the behavior of embers to help minimize the damage of future fires. The team developed the ember-shooting Idaho Dragon 2.0 to help devise ways to understand wildfire expansion and develop fire-resistant building material. The Idaho Dragon is small, portable and the only known device of its kind in academia.
Doug Hardman, a Ph.D. candidate working with Professor Alistair Smith in the Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences, guided the senior capstone project along with mechanical engineering Professor Mark Roll. The original dragon build began in 2022 before last year’s team took the baton and refined the machine.
“The first team developed a lot of the basics for how to actually create an ember generator,” Hardman said. “It was a basic model and had some issues with fire backburning into the fuel feed and container. Plus, we needed a better way to manage the embers coming out. The next team upgraded the materials and improved the flow dynamics of the design.”
The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety has expressed interest in the ember generator to supplement their larger ones in the testing of fire-resistant materials. Hardman said the Idaho Dragon could also be used for prescribed burns and other simulations, potentially at the U of I’s Experimental Forest. Fueled by wood chips, the machine also provides insights on how different wood embers behave in various conditions.
Peter Wieber is now two weeks into graduate school at Cornell, but he spent much of last year building the Idaho Dragon 2.0.
“We ran into some bumps in the road in the manufacturing process,” said Wieber, who majored in bioengineering. “But when everything was said and done, the device worked out quite well. When it was crunch time at the end of the year, everyone put in extra effort. It was a stressful time, but also the most fun.”
The National Academy of Engineering ranked the U of I’s College of Engineering’s Senior Capstone Design Program among the top seven in the nation for infusing real-world experiences into education.
As communities throughout the West face fire danger, the U of I is providing valuable tools to analyze fire-causing embers and provide solutions to keep people safe.
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