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The Wind Effect on the Transport and Burning of Firebrands

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Abstract

Firebrands, controlling spot fires, are often responsible for fast damages in wildland and urban fires. However, the behaviours of firebrands are difficult to predict. In this study, we conduct experiments in a wind tunnel to investigate the effect of wind on the smouldering burning and transport of firebrands. Three different sizes of disc wood particles (weighing about 1 g) are heated to generate smouldering firebrands, and then blown out by a horizontal wind of 5 or 7 m/s. In each experiment the transport distance (in the order of 1 m) and mass loss of firebrands are measured to examine their burning behaviours. For the first time, a bimodal distribution (burning and extinction modals) is observed for small firebrands under certain wind speeds (firebrands of 12-mm diameter and 5-mm thickness under a wind speed of 7 m/s in this work). Both the firebrand transport distance and mass loss in the extinction modal are smaller than those in the burning modal. The heat transfer analysis shows that there is a critical wind speed to quench the firebrand and produce a bimodal distribution, and its value increases with both the particle size and the heating duration. The predicted critical wind speed agrees well with experimental measurements.

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Acknowledgements

This research is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51625602 and 51476156) and the National Key Research and Development Plan (No. 2016YFC0800100). This work was also supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. WK2320000033 and WK2320000036).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, Anhui, People’s Republic of China

    Jiayun Song, Naian Liu, Han Li & Linhe Zhang

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Xinyan Huang

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  1. Jiayun Song
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  2. Xinyan Huang
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Correspondence to Naian Liu.

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Song, J., Huang, X., Liu, N. et al. The Wind Effect on the Transport and Burning of Firebrands. Fire Technol 53, 1555–1568 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-017-0647-1

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