Section B Fire and Explosion - A Study of Flame Spread in Engineered Cardboard Fuel Beds Part I: Correlations and Observations of Flame Spread

An exploratory data analysis of the temperature fluctuations in a spreading fire

“…Given the periodic pulsing noticed in fires moving up a plane, see Atkinson et al (), Brittany et al (), and Finney et al (). One looks for prominent peaks at lower frequencies, for example, in the third panel of Figure .…”

The Strouhal-Froude number scaling for wildland fire spread

“…This is a book written more than a half century ago when no computer simulation was available, but researchers' wisdom and unique insights in fire phenomena with their attempts to extract the governing physical laws which can help develop simple practical models are still valuable in the age of high speed computation, and therefore serve as an excellent reference for our forest fire research efforts. To continue the above book's philosophy, the USDA's Forest Service Fire Science Lab (Finney, Cohen, et al 2013) (Finney, Forthofer, et al 2013) made a series of unique observations on forest fires by high speed video photography and thermocouple temperature measurement techniques. These techniques are rather ordinary but their observation results are rather extra-ordinary.…”

“…Regardless of the local geometry of the fire edge, it progressed at the same rate across the fire front." (Finney, Forthofer, et al 2013) Almost 30 years prior to Finney's observations, F.A. Albini (Albini 1984) made a comprehensive review on wildland fires addressing Rothermel's steady-spread model (Rothermel 1972) to predict the rate of spread of surface fire as a successful example, while describing wildland fires as poorly understood phenomena.…”

“…When the above scaling laws are validated, it would be reasonable to design medium scale prescription fire experiments, which fall in size between the USDA experiments and full scale wildland fires. The USDA -University of Kentucky collaboration already produced two recent articles (Finney, Forthofer, et al 2013) (Adam, et al 2013), and we made further progress on the above study. In this paper we report recent field burn tests, organized by USDA Forest Service and conducted in Texas.…”

“…The USDA Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory and University of Kentucky Institute of Research for Technology Development (IR4TD) teams conducted two explorations to further understand ignition on a wildland fuel bed. The team first began by identifying and exploring flame behaviours in the lab environment that were previously only observed in large scale wildland fires (Finney, Forthofer, et al 2013) (Adam, et al 2013). The goal of our study is to identify features distinguishing radiative heat transfer from convective heat transfer.…”