Using the CFD capabilities of FDS to predict a vegetation fire in a sloped terrain
Abstract
A. Soummar and H. Miloua*
The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fire-driven fluid flow using a large-eddy simulation (LES) turbulence model for low-speed flows, with an emphasis on smoke and heat transport from fires. Smokeview is a program used to visualize numerical calculations generated from FDS. The validation and verification of the proposed fire models (FDS) for vegetation fire data at laboratory-scale experiments is the subject of this paper by comparing the fire front positions values and thermal functions such as the heat release rate (HRR) measured by Moredirini et al. (2018) from spreading fires for fuel bed slopes of 0° and 30° tested under two fuel loads of 0.6 and 0.4 kg.m-2,with no wind imposed. The results can be useful for the improvement and validation of FDS and provide global information on forest fire propagation under no slope and upslope terrain. The convergence of measured and predicted fire front position values is quite good, demonstrating that FDS accurately described plate and sloped fire.