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Fire spread is known to accelerate uphill over inclined surfaces due to an intrinsic coupling between geometry and fire-induced flows, especially when the slope exceeds a critical angle. The fundamental relationships which govern this close coupling, however, are not yet fully understood. To investigate these relationships, propane-fueled fires were produced over a tilt table at the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab. Large-scale fire tests with heat-release rates ranging from 81 kW to 2.25 MW were conducted. The angle of inclination, θ, was varied between 0∘ and 30∘. A micro-thermocouple array along the centerline of the table was used to measure downstream gas temperatures. Flames were seen to start attaching to the inclined surface at θ = 18∘, independent of the fireline intensity. The centerline temperatures under attached flame conditions are consistent with McCaffrey's buoyant flame temperature correlation, suggesting the buoyancy-driven nature of the inclined fires. The local gas velocity was measured using temperature-correlation velocimetry through the streamwise temperature signals. Results show that the local flow was accelerated in the attached flame region driven by buoyancy before reaching a peak. Velocity of the flow slowed down after the peak due to weaker buoyancy within the intermittent and plume regions. The mean surface velocity of the attached flame scales directly with the angle of inclination (sinθ) and the fireline intensity (I2/3), providing a promising method to evaluate convective heat transfer using the geometry of the inclined fire.

Large, severe wildfires continue to burn in frequent-fire adapted forests but the mechanisms that contribute to them and their predictability are important questions. Using a combination of ground based and remotely sensed data we analyzed the behavior and patterns of the 2020 Creek Fire where drought and bark beetles had previously created substantial levels of tree mortality in the southern Sierra Nevada. We found that dead biomass and live tree densities were the most important variables predicting fire severity; high severity fire encompassed 41% of the area and the largest high severity patch (19,592 ha) comprised 13% of total area burned. Areas with the highest amounts of dead biomass and live tree densities were also positively related to high severity fire patch size indicating that larger, more homogenous conditions of this forest characteristic resulted in adverse, landscape-scale fire effects. The first two days of the Creek Fire were abnormally hot and dry but weather during the days of the greatest fire growth was largely within the normal range of variation for that time of year with one day with lower windspeeds. From September 5 to 8th the fire burned almost 50% of its entire area and fire intensity patterns inferred from remotely sensed brightness-temperature data were typical except on September 6th when heat increased towards the interior of the fire. Not only was the greatest heat concentrated away from the fire perimeter, but a significant amount of heat was still being generated within the fire perimeter from the previous day. This is a classic pattern for a mass fire and the high amount of dead biomass created from the drought and bark beetles along with high live tree densities were critical factors in developing mass fire behavior. Operational fire behavior models were not able to predict this behavior largely because they do not include post-frontal combustion and fire-atmosphere interactions. An important question regarding this mass fire is if the tree mortality event that preceded it could have been avoided or reduced or was it within the natural range of variation for these forests? We found that the mortality episode was outside of historical analogs and was exacerbated by past management decisions. The Creek Fire shows us how vulnerable of our current frequent-fire forest conditions are to suffering high tree mortality and offering fuel conditions capable of generating mass fires from which future forest recovery is questionable because of type conversion and probable reoccurring high severity fire.

Large wildfires of increasing frequency and severity threaten local populations and natural resources and contribute carbon emissions into the earth-climate system. Although wildfires have been researched and modeled for decades, no verifiable physical theory of spread is available to form the basis for the precise predictions needed to manage fires more effectively and reduce their environmental, economic, ecological, and climate impacts. Here, we report new experiments conducted at multiple scales that appear to reveal how wildfire spread derives from the tight coupling between flame dynamics induced by buoyancy and fine-particle response to convection. Convective cooling of the fine-sized fuel particles in wildland vegetation is observed to efficiently offset heating by thermal radiation until convective heating by contact with flames and hot gasses occurs. The structure and intermittency of flames that ignite fuel particles were found to correlate with instabilities induced by the strong buoyancy of the flame zone itself. Discovery that ignition in wildfires is critically dependent on nonsteady flame convection governed by buoyant and inertial interaction advances both theory and the physical basis for practical modeling.

The current study presents a series of experiments investigating the smoldering behavior of woody fuel arrays at various porosities under the influence of wind. Wildland fuels are simulated using wooden cribs burned inside a bench scale wind tunnel. Smoldering behavior was characterized using measurements of both mass loss and emissions. Results showed that the mean burning rate increased with wind speed for all cases. In high porosity cases, increases in burning rate between 18% and 54% were observed as wind speed increased. For low porosity cases an increase of about 170% in burning rate was observed between 0.5 and 0.75 m/s. The ratio of CO/CO2 emissions decreased with wind speed. Thus, wind likely served to promote smoldering combustion as indicated by the decrease of CO/CO2 which is a marker of combustion efficiency. A theoretical analysis was conducted to assess the exponential decay behavior in the time-resolved mass loss data. Mass and heat transfer models were applied to assess whether oxygen supply or heat losses can solely explain the observed exponential decay. The analysis showed that neither mass transfer nor heat transfer alone can explain the exponential decay, but likely a combination thereof is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of radiation and convection in determining the heating that leads to ignition of fuel particles were explored using experiments with spreading laboratory fires and a numerical fuel particle heating model. As a follow-on to "Fuel Particle Heat Transfer, Part 1" (this issue), two sizes of square wood fuel particles (1 mm and 12 mm) were instrumented with fine-wire thermocouples to measure particle surface temperatures and adjacent gas temperatures. Radiation heat flux from the approaching fire was measured at the fuel bed particle location. Seven laboratory fires with varying fuel beds, spread rates, and wind speeds were used to measure the conditions experienced by both particles. Experimental results demonstrated that intermittent flame contact ahead of the advancing flame front was principally responsible for heating fuel particles to ignition even with peak irradiance up to 44 kW/m2. A two-dimensional numerical fuel particle heat transfer model was employed to separate the influences of the measured irradiance (radiation) and gas temperature (convection) on particle heating as the flame front approached. Results demonstrated that radiation heating was insufficient for ignition of both particle sizes during the spreading laboratory fires. The low convective heat transfer of the 12 mm particle did not significantly cool the particle, and the brief duration of irradiance was insufficient for ignition. The greater 1 mm particle convective heat transfer offset radiant heating by convectively cooling with ambient air, but rapidly heated the particle during intermittent impingement of hot gases from the flaming front leading to particle pre-ignition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wildfire spread requires fuel particles heated to ignition but the roles of radiation and convection heat transfer have not before been examined in detail. This paper reports on laboratory experiments and numerical modeling of wood particle response when subjected to a fixed radiant flux. The experiments used a propane-fueled radiant panel with an elliptical mirror system to focus a constant radiant flux on fuel particles of different sizes and cross-sectional shapes. Particle temperature was measured with fine-wire thermocouples embedded on the surface. Particle heating during free and forced convection with ambient air was found to depend on particle size, specifically the convective length of the irradiated surface. Ambient convection cooled 1 mm square particles sufficiently to prevent ignition but not 3 mm particles and larger. Surface area-to-volume ratio did not govern particle surface heating but did determine a particle's thermal response rate. A finite difference, numerical method was developed to solve a two-dimensional, transient conduction model with radiative and convective boundary conditions. Model results were reliable when compared to experimental results and confirmed particle surface length (convection) as a principal determining factor governing fuel particle heating and fuel particle ignition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]