Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Influence of Base Sheathing Material on Wind-Driven Firebrand Production during Real-Scale Building Component Combustion

Published

Author(s)

Samuel L. Manzello, Sayaka Suzuki, Tomohiro Naruse

Abstract

The production of firebrands during large outdoor fires remains unresolved in spite of many advances in the fire safety science discipline. To better grasp this complex problem, multiple experiments were undertaken using full-scale re-entrant corner assemblies exposed to wind in order to sample firebrands. In prior work, an ignition methodology was developed to generate firebrands from re-entrant corner assemblies constructed of wood studs and oriented strand board (OSB) as the base sheathing material. The objective of this study was to apply this same ignition methodology to examine if the base sheathing material, namely plywood as compared to OSB, greatly impacted the firebrand generation from re-entrant corner assembly combustion. It was interesting to observe that plywood generally produced far greater numbers of smaller firebrands (within size class up to 0.9 cm2), whereas OSB produced a great number of firebrands in the size class from 3.61 to 14.4 cm2. It is believed that these differences may be related to the different nature of the production process of these materials. Plywood firebrands clearly showed the presence of veneers, whereas the OSB firebrands show the wood strands still compressed together, suggesting a potential useful inspection methodology for post-fire damage assessment to identify the source of firebrands.
Proceedings Title
11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (AOSFST)
Conference Dates
October 21-25, 2018
Conference Location
Taipei

Keywords

Firebrands, Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires, Urban Fires

Citation

Manzello, S. , Suzuki, S. and Naruse, T. (2019), Influence of Base Sheathing Material on Wind-Driven Firebrand Production during Real-Scale Building Component Combustion, 11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (AOSFST), Taipei, -1, [online], https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9139-3_50 (Accessed December 6, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created September 13, 2019, Updated October 4, 2019