Using Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) to Augment Laboratory Scale Fires

Control measures such as prescribed burns to prevent wildfires in Southern California, have to be conducted during summer and fall months when the risk of fire is high. A significant hindrance to the prescribed burn in these weather conditions is the presence of ladder fuels which facilitate transition of surface fires to unmanageable crown fires. Laboratory scaled study was conducted to understand the interaction between surface fires and ladder fires to supplement the current knowledge on the chapparal fire ecosystem. Thermal energy exchange, rate of spread and fire intensity is determined based on mass loss and temperatures obtained from thermocouples and IR camera. This climate dependent experimental study requires multiple recurrences over a long period of time. Hence, for a complete understanding of fire spread pattern we deployed fire dynamics simulator to augment the obtained experimental data. Results from these simulations would later be compared with the ongoing experiments during different weather conditions. This combination of cyber-physical study gives a comprehensive understanding of the transition from surface fires to crown fires via the ladder fuels. In this presentation we will discuss the experimental setup, laboratory results and comparable FDS simulations.