Enable a more fundamental understanding of the conditions required to ignite construction materials in wildland urban interface fire conditions

This Cooperative Agreement award by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the Measurement and Engineering Research and Standards (CFDA 11.609) program, is funding research to develop an open-source computational model for predicting the combustion and heat transfer from smoldering firebrand piles and their potential to ignite construction materials in wildland-urban interface (WUI) fire conditions. The $388,419 award to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, also known as Virginia Tech, will support a 3-year project to build upon the existing open-source OpenPNM network model to incorporate the required physics for simulating multi-phase, reacting flows around smoldering firebrands and their interaction with combustible materials. The research aims to provide an efficient computational approach to assess the risk of infrastructure ignition due to firebrand showers, as well as insight to help material developers create more fire-resistant construction products for the WUI. No sub-awards are planned under this grant.

Purpose

The purpose of this grant is to enable a more fundamental understanding of the conditions required to ignite construction materials in wildland urban interface fire conditions.

Activities

The multi-physics, multi-phase network model developed in this research will build on the open source network model openpnm, which already contains the basic pore network modeling framework. The research will add the required physics to predict the reacting, multi-phase flow in and around a smoldering firebrand pile and benchmark the model results with data and to predict the temperature rise and ignition of a combustible material in contact with the smoldering firebrand pile.

Expected outcomes

This research will provide an open source, computationally efficient approach to predicting the combustion and heat transfer from a pile of smoldering firebrands. In addition, the model will be capable of predicting the ignition of construction materials in the WUI based on their ignition data.

Intended beneficiaries

The engineering community will be able to assess the risk of infrastructure ignition due to firebrand showers. Material developers be use the information to support creating new materials more resistant to ignition in the WUI.

Subrecipient activities

The recipient does not intend to subaward funds.