Physics-Based Modeling of Wildland-Urban Interface Fires

Abstract

This paper addresses the development of a practical physicsbased model for fires in the wildland-urban intermix. These fires arise when wildland burning invades the built environment. Fire models for ignition and spread must consider individual fuel elements of both vegetation and structures in order to assess fire risk of developed properties. The potential fuel loadings for various land uses demonstrates that structures can provide much higher loadings than wildlands do. However, the time scales for ignition and the heat release rates for the wildland fuel and the fuel in the structures will be widely disparate, influencing both the spread rate of the fire and its persistence. The NIST computational model known as the Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) was developed to study building fires. Its potential use to study community-scale fire spread is discussed.