There is a need to develop innovative firefighting methods against large-scale, simultaneous and widespread forest fires. It is difficult to transport the fire extinguishing agent to the target position accurately in the general fire extinguishing method using water from the air because it is strongly affected by natural convection and wind. In addition, in fire extinguishing using water, the adhesion to combustible surfaces is poor, and there is also a problem in reignition suppression performance. In recent years, methods using high-viscosity fluids and gels have been investigated as a solution to this problem. In this paper, we outline the case studies of fire extinguishing methods using high-viscosity fluids and gels, and furthermore, describe our approach to a fire extinguishing method that uses a blast to transport high-viscosity fluids (“Hydro-Gel Blasting (HGB) fire extinguishing method”).
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