- Author
-
Rehm, R. G.
- Title
- Effects of Winds From Burning Structures on Ground-Fire Propagation at the Wildland-Urban Interface.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Journal
-
Combustion Theory and Modelling,
Vol. 12,
No. 3,
477-496,
June 2008
- Sponsor
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Keywords
-
wildland urban interface
|
wind effects
|
structures
|
combustion
|
flame propagation
|
heterogeneous burning
|
mathematical models
|
fire spread
|
fire models
|
fire behavior
|
heat release rate
|
plumes
|
scaling
|
wildland fires
|
equations
|
computational fluid dynamics
|
grasslands
|
ground fires
- Identifiers
- physics-based models of fire behavior; heat release rates of grass and structure fires; grass fires; Wildand Fire Dynamics Simulator (WFDS); types of wildfires, rate of spread (ROS) and intensities; data for testing WFDS model; simple model for WUI ground-fire spread; plume model of Baum and McCaffrey; scaling relations; characteristic scaling quantities for cases of structure fires; characteristic scaling quantities for cases of wildland fires; fire-front propagation
- Abstract
- A simple physics-based mathematical model is developed for prediction of the propagation of a grass-fire front driven by an ambient wind and by entrainment winds generated from one or more burning structures. This model accounts for the heterogeneous nature of the burning in a particular wildland-urban-interface (WUI) setting, where the entrainment from fundamentally three-dimensional structure-fire plumes can change the propagation of a two-dimensional ground-fire front. Data on grass fires and estimates of structure fires are presented and compared to justify the model. Scaling effects on the fire-front propagation-speed are given as a function of the location of the front, of the heat release rate of a single burning structure, of the total number of burning structures and of the burning-structure density. Also, detailed front propagation changes due to a single and multiple burning-house scenarios are presented.