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This study investigated the thermal conditions preceding ignition of three dense woody fuels often found on structures by firebrands, a major cause of home ignition during wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires. Piles of smoldering cylindrical firebrands, fabricated from wooden dowels, were deposited either on a flat inert surface instrumented with temperature and heat flux sensors or on a target fuel (marine-grade plywood, oriented-strand board, or cedar shingles) to investigate critical conditions at ignition. The former provided thermal data to characterize the time before and at ignition, while the latter provided smoldering and flaming ignition times. Tests were conducted in a small-scale wind tunnel. Larger firebrand piles produced higher temperatures at the center of the pile, thought to be due to re-radiation within the pile. Ignition was found to be dependent on target fuel density; flaming ignition was additionally found to be dependent on wind speed. Higher wind speeds increased the rate of oxidation and led to higher temperatures and heat fluxes measured on the test surface. The heat flux at ignition was determined by combining results of inert and ignition tests, showing that ignition occurred while transient heating from the firebrand pile was increasing. Ultimately, critical ignition conditions from firebrand pile exposure are needed to design appropriate fire safety standards and WUI fire modeling.

Experiments have found substantial morphological differences between buoyancy-driven flames developing on the upper and lower surfaces of inclined burning plates. These differences cannot be explained on the basis of existing analytical solutions of steady semi-infinite flames, which provide identical descriptions for the top and bottom configurations. To investigate the potential role of flame instabilities in the experimentally observed flow differences, a temporal linear stability analysis is performed here. The problem is formulated in the limit of infinitely fast reaction, taking into account the non-unity Lewis number of the fuel vapor. The stability analysis incorporates non-parallel effects of the base flow and considers separately spanwise traveling waves and Görtler-like streamwise vortices. The solution to the stability eigenvalue problem determines the downstream location at which the flow becomes unstable, characterized by a critical value of the relevant Grashof number, whose value varies with the plate inclination angle. The results for the flame formed on the underside of the fuel surface indicate that instabilities emerge farther downstream than they do for a flame developing over the top of the fuel surface, in agreement with experimental observations. Increased buoyancy-induced vorticity production is reasoned to be responsible for the augmented instability tendency of topside flames.