
The question to be addressed by this research team is "Can fire flow
within a forest environment be accurately modeled using Huygens principles?"
About five-million acres of woodland forests burn in the United Sates every
year. While most fires are small and easily contained, some can grow exponentially
into massive fires that can cause thousands of dollars in damage. Almost five
years ago, the Cerro Grande fire decimated thousands of acres of national
and private land. More recently, there have been fires in the Albuquerque
Bosque that threatened city buildings and the local population. Using C++
to construct a mathematical model based on Huygens Principle, the team will
develop a program to model three-dimensional fire progression and heat flow
in a given area. If time allows, the research team will also model external
factors including human intervention and other factors. Huygens principles
and equations can be found at http://firemodeling.net/downloads/MTT_Finney_2002.pdf
.