These Indoor Wildfires Help Engineers Study the Real Thing
June 28, 2016 - See researchers start their own fires to study how wildfires burn.
Wildfires can be a devastating force that are hard to predict, but a team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside create these fires in their lab to understand how they burn and spread. The researchers prepare different types of forest brush and add other elements such as wind and humidity that affect fire behavior. The data collected is then used to predict how wildfires will behave under certain conditions. By working with the U.S. Forest Service, the researchers hope that their experiments will help firefighters understand and manage real fires.
Read National Geographic photographer Mark Thiessen's first-person account on working inside California's wildfires.
MARKO PRINCEVAC, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:
Fire and especially wildfire is a really complex phenomena. I hear people talking about being able to control fire. I don’t think that’s something that will happen soon, but here at least we are trying to understand fire.
DAVID WEISE, RESEARCH FORESTER, PACIFIC SOUTHWEST RESEARCH STATION,
U.S. FOREST SERVICE:
There’s factors that effect fire from the individual list, clear up to the top of the atmosphere. The current model that we use to help us predict fire spread is about 40 years old, and so what we’re doing with these experiments is probing deeper and trying to provide more information about how fire spreads in wildlands.
JEANETTE COBIAN IÑIGUEZ, PH.D. STUDENT, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:
Today we’re going to run different types of experiments and we’re trying to understand under which conditions the fire, if it ignites on the service, will transition and spread.
So, this is replicating dead fuels, which is typically on the ground, what catches easily on fire is the dead fuel.
This one that you see here with the leaves, this is our, what we call the live fuels.
The live fuels are collected locally. So, it’s very important for us to study the specific fuel here, because it’s such a great contributor to the wildfires that we get in the region.
MARKO PRINCEVAC, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:
Wind tunnel is instrumented with a barrage of instruments that includes temperature probes, so thermal couples, heat flux sensors, relative humidity sensors, load cells that are measuring mass loss of fuel.
STUDENT SOT: Ready for the weights?
JEANETTE COBIAN IÑIGUEZ, PH.D. STUDENT, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:
Once our computers are ready and our cameras are ready, we’re ready to ignite.
JEANETTE SOT: Are we all ready? Ignition.
JEANETTE COBIAN IÑIGUEZ, PH.D. STUDENT, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:
Our study wants to focus on, if the dead fuels do catch fire, through lightening or cigarette butt or something, whether that will transition to the actual live shrub. Once it gets to the live shrub, we want to know if it’s going to spread throughout the whole shrub community.
MARKO PRINCEVAC, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:
Today we are varying wind speed. Wind is supplying more oxygen to fire so fire can consume fuels much faster. In experiments where we have wind, fire is much more intense, flame height is much higher. Wind will help those flames to be tilted, which will enable neighboring fuel to ignite faster.
STUDENT SOT: You can see it peaked at 800 celcius, 1500 farenheight
MARKO PRINCEVAC, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:
We work with the forest service to provide them information that they need to manage the land.
DAVID WEISE SOT: We got wind blowing this way and you got a flame, is the wind able to go passed this?
DAVID WEISE, RESEARCH FORESTER, PACIFIC SOUTHWEST RESEARCH STATION,
U.S. FOREST SERVICE:
Here in California, we have a condition called Santa Ana winds, which are high speed winds, which cause destructive fire. Wind is probably one of the most important factors that effects fire spread. We’re modeling it to control as much as we can so we can really understand what the important variables are.
MARKO PRINCEVAC, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:
Down the road, we hope to have a perfect computer model that we simply ask, if ignition occurs in this part of the forest, under certain conditions, what will happen within the next thirty minutes, within one hour, what would be the best way to deploy resources.
JEANETTE COBIAN IÑIGUEZ, PH.D. STUDENT, DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE:Global climate change is going to bring more wildfires with greater intensity in areas like Southern California. In order to combat them we need to understand them, know how to predict them, and then know how to fight them.
