Development of CFD Model to Study the Spread of Wildfires

Abstract

Wildfires are a worldwide phenomenon that as an impact on all surrounding forms of life. Studying these events is essential to develop and optimize the tools used for combat and prevention, and its behavior is associated with the state of the vegetation, atmospheric conditions, ground properties, and many others, constituting an expensive and challenging task. This work presents itself as a complementary work to study the flow over a forest through a CFD model, which causes a modification in the velocity profile due to the drag produced by the forest presence, and the values obtained can be used in a mathematical model to study the fire rate of spread and fireline intensity considering the new velocity field. The CFD model was applied in the commercial software Ansys Fluent. The results confirmed that the wind is a dominant force during a forest fire, i.e., at high velocities the fire has an aggressive behavior and at low velocities tends to calm down. However, due to the unpredictability of certain weather conditions, it is dangerous to say that a forest fire is fully controlled since its behavior can change in a matter of minutes.