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Type: Journal Article
Author(s): Sayaka Suzuki; Samuel L. Manzello; Yoshihiko Hayashi
Publication Date: 2013

Wildfires that spread into communities, commonly referred to as Wildland-Urban Interface fires (WUI), are a significant international problem. Post-fire damage studies have suggested for some time that firebrands are a significant cause of structure ignition in WUI fires, yet little research has been conducted to investigate firebrand production from burning vegetation and structures. To this end, firebrand production from real-scale building components under well-controlled laboratory conditions was investigated. Specifically, wall and re-entrant corner assemblies were ignited and during the combustion process, firebrands were collected to determine the size/mass distribution generated from such real-scale building components under varying wind speed. Finally, the size and mass distributions of firebrands collected in this study were compared with the data from an actual full-scale structure burn to determine if simple component tests such as these can provide insights into firebrand generation data from full-scale structures. The results are presented and discussed.

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Citation: Suzuki, Sayaka; Manzello, Samuel L.; Hayashi, Yoshihiko. 2013. The size and mass distribution of firebrands collected from ignited building components exposed to wind. Proceedings of the Combustion Institute 34(12):2479-2485.

Cataloging Information

Regions:
Alaska    California    Eastern    Great Basin    Hawaii    Northern Rockies    Northwest    Rocky Mountain    Southern    Southwest    National
Keywords:
  • firebrand
  • ignition
  • laboratory experiments
  • laboratory fires
  • structure ignition
  • winds
Record Last Modified:
Record Maintained By: FRAMES Staff (https://www.frames.gov/contact)
FRAMES Record Number: 25335