- 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.