The original goal of this program was to create a model that attempted to accurately model fire flow. This year’s goal was to improve upon the previous year’s progress. The team achieved great success in more accurately modeling the spread of fire by incorporating concepts from Huygen’s Principle along with many other fire-spread models. Historically, fires cause more damage every year than any other natural disaster. When attempting to model fire, several important factors must be considered in order to project for realistic fire flow. These factors include spread rates over different fuels and heat’s effect on fire, as fire acceleration, wind, elevation, moisture contents, amounts of fuel, spot fires, and crown fires. However, accounting for all these variables requires an extremely complex model. Therefore, this project concentrates on the basis of fire flow in two dimensions limiting its factors to what was verifiable.
In building this year’s model, rather than just modeling heat flow to demonstrate the advance of a fire as was done last year, both fire flow and heat flow have been differentiated to more realistically show a fire’s expansion perimeter. The most important aspect of heat generated by a fire is the possibility that heat could lead to the rapid acceleration of a fires perimeter. The basis of the fire flow process is the Elliptical Fire Theory, which simply states that fire will form a perfect circle under perfect conditions. The fire flow process involves locating the fire’s perimeter and extending new fire ellipses. The determining factor which establishes fire flow is the varying degrees of spread rates of the virtual-forest fuels. In the program, heat flow is accounted for using Newton’s Law of Cooling, the Stefan Boltzmann Law of Radiation, and Fourier’s Law of Conduction.
The environment also plays a crucial role in determining fire flow. In order for certain patches, which are locations in the environment, to burn, they must have reached an ignition point, or minimal burn temperature. Each patch owns different fuel types, amounts of fuel, spread rates, temperatures, and other independent and dependent variables that define fire flow in the program.
The basis of this program, the Elliptical Fire Theory, has been verified through empirical data collection. However, the limitations of this computer projection are many. These limitations are related to the multitude of variables within the fire flow process. Many of these variables could have been used, but much more time and research are needed to do this. Thus far, this project has yielded a foundation which can be built upon one step at a time.