Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A one dimensional numerical model of reverse combustion is proposed to describe the physical mechanisms which control the fire spread in a fuel bed of pine needles. The physical model is constructed from a multiphase formulation, including various submodels to account for the main phenomena which contribute at different levels to fire spread. The set of partial differential equations which governs the physical behavior of the gas flow and of the solid fuel bed is solved using a finite volume method associated with an adaptive mesh algorithm to track correctly the thin region where the thermal degradation of the solid fuel occurs. Both oxygen-limited and fuel-limited regimes are examined for inlet flow velocities ranging from 2 to 30cm/s.