Determining Ignition Regime Maps of Building Materials Exposed to Continuous Wind-Driven Firebrand Showers

Published

December 5, 2011

Author(s)

Samuel L. Manzello, Sayaka S. Suzuki

Abstract

Firebrands are a major cause of structural ignition in urban fires in Japan and Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires in the USA, yet little research has been conducted to investigate the ignition of building materials to wind driven firebrand showers. To this end, the present investigation was undertaken to construct a new and improved Dragon’s LAIR facility. This entailed removing the NIST Baby Dragon from the wind tunnel facility and inserting the new and improved NIST continuous feed Baby Dragon. The unique features of the continuous feed Baby Dragon, over the current NIST Baby Dragon, is the capability to produce a constant firebrand shower in order to expose building materials to continual firebrand bombardment. It is now possible to precisely control the number flux, mass flux, and state of combustion of firebrands generated using this facility. The efficacy of this bench scale experimental facility to determine ignition regime maps of building materials exposed to wind driven firebrand showers is presented.

Proceedings Title

49th Japanese Combustion Symposium

Volume

49

Conference Dates

December 5-7, 2011

Conference Location

Yokohama

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

Local Download

Keywords

WUI Fires, Firebrands, Ignition

Citation

Manzello, S. and Suzuki, S. (2011), Determining Ignition Regime Maps of Building Materials Exposed to Continuous Wind-Driven Firebrand Showers, 49th Japanese Combustion Symposium, Yokohama, -1, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=909689 (Accessed December 4, 2024)