NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF WIND-DRIVEN FIRE FLUMES

In many large urban-fire scenarios one of the critical issues is to attempt to protect the lives of fire fighters in helicopters deployed to flying over the fires and also the lives of people trapped in open areas downwind of the fires such as in parks. The strategies of such protection measures depend significantly on our knowledge of the size and extent of such fires as affected by the prevailing winds. In this study, the shape or profile of the fire plume typical of large urban fires, as affected by a steady unidirectional wind with or without imposing a shear flow on the fire plume, has been simulated numerically by a field model. The results show that the simulations provide realistic flame profiles and at least qualitatively, the same flame dynamics when compared to those from the experiments, and that the fire plumes are sensitive to small variations in the asymmetry of the wind shears, including the appearance of swirling flames within the fire plumes.