Characteristics and Mechanism of Fire Spread between Full-Scale Wooden Houses from Internal Fires

Abstract

In ancient villages, the spread of uninterrupted fires caused great damage to clustered wooden houses. Thus, the spread of fire among wooden houses should be systematically studied to explore its characteristics. Statistical analysis is a feasible way to study the characteristics and underlying mechanisms of fire in full-scale wooden houses. In this study, 4 full-scale wooden buildings were built in an ethnic village in Guizhou Province, and the fire spread test was conducted by igniting a 0.63-MW power wood crib. To investigate the fire spread, the visual characteristics were observed, and the temperatures and heat radiation at special locations were monitored with thermocouples and radiation flowmeters, respectively. The effect of relative slope, heat radiation, and wind direction on fire spread characteristics was established by mathematical statistics, and the measured temperatures were used to verify the statistics’ regularity. The results showed that in wooden houses, fire spread was mainly influenced by the slope, the distance between houses, and wind direction. When the inner wall of a wooden house is protected by a fireproof coating, the thermal radiation spread and fire spread are both slower. The slope and distance had the same influence weight (0.41) on fire spread; however, since they affect the process in different ways, they should be analyzed separately for fire risk evaluation. The findings of this study provide a theoretical foundation for understanding the fire spread process in wooden buildings.

Contemporary Fire Safety Engineering in Timber Structures: Challenges and Solutions

“…Scholars have also researched the spread of fires in ancient timber structure complexes. In ancient villages, the spread of uninterrupted fires caused significant damage to timber structure complexes [107]. Yuan et al [107] studied the characteristics and underlying mechanisms of fire in full-scale timber houses.…”

“…In ancient villages, the spread of uninterrupted fires caused significant damage to timber structure complexes [107]. Yuan et al [107] studied the characteristics and underlying mechanisms of fire in full-scale timber houses. The results showed that, in timber houses, fire spread was mainly influenced by the slope, the distance between places, and wind direction [107].…”

“…Yuan et al [107] studied the characteristics and underlying mechanisms of fire in full-scale timber houses. The results showed that, in timber houses, fire spread was mainly influenced by the slope, the distance between places, and wind direction [107]. The implementation of experimental work lays a solid foundation for the numerical simulation of fire characteristics in timber structures.…”

“…Nan et al [113] investigated the effect of non-uniform fuel load distribution on fire development in a sufficiently ventilated space, and the work revealed the possible underestimation of fire hazards by assuming evenly distributed fuel loads and suggested considering design fire scenarios of non-uniform fuel load distribution in performance-based fire safety design [113]. In total, visualizing and analyzing the macroscopic combustion behavior of timber structures affords a theoretical foundation for emergency planning and firefighting interventions [53,93,107].…”

Influences of Species and Density on the Horizontal Flame Spread Behavior of Densified Wood

“…Densified wood has excellent mechanical performance, higher than many traditional construction materials, presenting promising potential in applications in medium-and high-rise timber buildings [6,7]. Nevertheless, the fire safety of densified wood is hardly known, and due to the flammable nature of wood [8,9], it deserves to be investigated to improve its application. The results would be significant for evaluating the fire behavior of wooden structures constructed with dense wood.…”