Fire Schemes Research Articles

Efficient simulation of wildfire spread on an irregular grid

A cell-based wildfire simulator that uses an irregular grid is presented. Cell-based methods are simpler to implement than fire front propagation methods but have traditionally been plagued by fire shape distortion caused by the fire only being able to travel in certain directions. Using an irregular grid randomises the error introduced by the grid, so that the shape of simulated fire spread is independent of the direction of the wind with respect to the underlying grid. The cell-based fire spread simulator is implemented using discrete event simulation, which is a much more efficient computational method than conventional wildfire simulation techniques because computing resources are not used in repeatedly computing small updates to parts of the fire whose dynamics change infrequently, namely those areas of a fire that move slowly. The resulting simulator is comparable in accuracy with traditional fire front propagation schemes but is much faster and can therefore be used as an engine for fire simulation applications that require large numbers of simulations, such as in the role of a risk analysis engine.

Enhancing wildland fire prediction on cluster systems applying evolutionary optimization techniques

Classical prediction fire schemes do not match the real fire propagation, basically, because of the complexity of the physical models involved, the need for a great amount of computation and the difficulties of providing accurate input parameters. We describe an enhanced prediction scheme, which uses recent fire history and optimization techniques to predict near future propagation. The proposed method takes advantage of the computational power offered by distributed systems to accelerate the optimization process at real time.

Brillouin Scattering Based Distributed Fiber Optic Temperature Sensing For Fire Detection

This paper presents a distributed fiber optic Brillouin scattering investigation, which involves measuring the Brillouin intensity versus time for real-time temperature measurements. This can be applied in practical fire detection schemes through the use of a threshold temperature that corresponds to the maximum Brillouin intensity. In the experiments, an 11 km fiber length was interrogated by 20 ns pulses (2 m spatial resolution) to monitor the temperature variations in a 10 m fiber region. The corresponding theory has confirmed the suitability of real-time intensity monitoring for temperature measurement.

Towards the development of a fire safety systems evaluation for public assembly buildings

The application of the Delphi Technique in the development of fire safety evaluation schemes is reviewed. The Analytic Hierarchical Process is introduced and suggested as an appropriate tool for use in the development of fire safety evaluation schemes using expert opinion. A study undertaken to investigate the potential of the AHP in the development of a fire safety evaluation scheme for public assembly buildings is reported. The results obtained indicate that the AHP which incorporates a check for consistency in the decision making process is a useful tool for handling information obtained on a judgmental basis.