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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Contents Vol 32(12)

Numerical simulation of two parallel merging wildfires

Rahul Wadhwani https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0675-8800 A , Duncan Sutherland B , Khalid Moinuddin C and Xinyan Huang A *
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Research Centre for Fire Safety Engineering, Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, ZS832, 181 Chatham Road South, Kowloon, Hong Kong.

B School of Science, University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.

C Institute of Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.

* Correspondence to: xy.huang@polyu.edu.hk

International Journal of Wildland Fire 32(12) 1726-1740 https://doi.org/10.1071/WF23071
Submitted: 10 May 2023  Accepted: 15 September 2023  Published: 18 October 2023

© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing on behalf of IAWF.

Abstract

Background

Wildfire often shows complex dynamic behaviour due to the inherent nature of ambient conditions, vegetation and ignition patterns. Merging fire is one such dynamic behaviour that plays a critical role in the safety of structures and firefighters.

Aim & method

The aim of this study was to develop better insight and understanding of the interaction of parallel merging firelines, using a numerical validation of a physics-based CFD wildfire model concerning merging fires.

Conclusions

The validated model shows a relative error of 5–35% in estimating the rate of fire spread compared with the experimental observation in most of the cases. A physical interpretation is presented to show how parallel fire behaves and interacts with the ambient conditions, providing complementary information to the experimental study.

Implications

The validated numerical model serves as a base case for further study in developing a better correlation for the rate of fire spread between parallel firelines with different ambient conditions, especially at the field scale.

Keywords: CFD simulations, field scale, fire dynamics simulator (FDS), fire model validation, merging fire interaction, parallel firelines, rate of fire spread, wildfire spread.

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