The Size and Mass Distribution of Firebrands collected from Ignited Building Components Exposed to Wind

Published

July 6, 2012

Author(s)

Sayaka S. Suzuki, Samuel Manzello, Yoshihiko Hayashi

Abstract

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 reentrant 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.

Citation

Proceedings of the Combustion Institute

Volume

34

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proci.2012.06.061

Local Download

Keywords

WUI fire, firebrand

Citation

Suzuki, S. , Manzello, S. and Hayashi, Y. (2012), The Size and Mass Distribution of Firebrands collected from Ignited Building Components Exposed to Wind, Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, [online], https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proci.2012.06.061, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=910415 (Accessed October 14, 2025)