Fire spread across pine needle fuel beds: characterization of temperature and velocity distributions within the fire plume

Abstract

The aim of this article is twofold. First, it concerns the improvement of knowledge on the fundamental physical mechanisms that control the propagation of forest fires. To proceed, an experimental apparatus was designed to study, in laboratory conditions, the flame of a fire spreading across a pine needle fuel bed. Characterization of temperature was managed by using a reconstruction method based on a double thermocouple probe technique developed recently. The vertical gas velocity distribution was derived from the previous reconstructed signals by measuring the transit time of a thermal fluctuation between two points of the flow. Second, the experimental data were used for the testing of a physical two-phase model of forest fire behavior in which the decomposition of solid fuel constituting a forest fuel bed as well as the multiple interactions with the gas phase are represented.