Proposal of Standard Wildfire Curves for the Design Protection of Dwellings against Wildland Fire

Abstract

This paper presents research that proposes a new standard fire curve to simulate exterior wildfire due to burning trees and bushes. An extensive inquiry was performed in the existing scientific literature, in the search of measured temperature versus time wildfire curves by other authors, in trees and bushes using in situ thermocouples. The gathered wildfire curves for both trees and bushes are plotted together, and envelope upper-bond wildfire design curves are proposed. The objective of these new proposed fire curves is for them to be used in the design of the protection of dwellings located in the urban wildland interface against the action of a natural wildfire. To access the efficiency of these proposed fire curves, a thermal numerical analysis is performed using the commercial finite-element software Abaqus, in which a wood specimen is subjected to real wildfire and compared with the proposed wildfire design temperature versus time curves.