Field and full-scale laboratory testing of prototype wildland fire shelters
Joseph Roise
A * , John Williams A , Roger Barker B and John Morton-Aslanis B
A North Carolina State University, Forestry and Environmental Resources, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27695, USA
B North Carolina State University, TPACC, College of Textiles, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27695, USA
International Journal of Wildland Fire 31(5) 518-528 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF21102
Submitted: 16 July 2021 Accepted: 23 March 2022 Published: 28 April 2022
© 2022 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
This paper describes a series of tests conducted to evaluate prototype fire shelters designed to provide enhanced thermal protective insulation in wildland fire burn-over events. Full-scale laboratory and field tests are used to compare the thermal performance of the prototypes with a fire shelter construction in current use in the United States. Laboratory tests showed that the prototype fire shelters outperformed the current shelter in providing fire-blocking thermal insulation in tests designed to simulate exposure to the intense flame conditions encountered in wildland fires. Field tests supported laboratory comparisons, but proved to be statistically inconclusive in differentiating shelter performance because of the variability inherent in thermal data obtained in field burns. This study confirmed the value of evaluating prototype shelter designs in laboratory tests capable of reproducibly simulating exposure to turbulent flames encountered in wildland fires.
Keywords: conduction, convection, field testing of fire shelters, fire shelter, flame-blocking materials, laboratory testing of fire shelters, M2002, personal protection in wildland fires, radiation, wildland fire shelters.
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