Evidence presented in a recently released study, authored by a team of scientists from the USDA Forest Service, University of Maryland and University of Kentucky, reveals new findings about how wildfires actually spread and could have significant impacts on firefighter safety and fuel hazards mitigation.

Published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, the study, “Role of buoyant flame dynamics in wildfire spread,” specifically reveals how flame dynamics that produce and transport convective heat effectively governs the spread of wildfire. It was previously unclear how radiation and convection heat transfer processes, which both occur in wildfires, are organized to produce wildfire spread.

A team of 10 researchers contributed to the study, coming from the USDA Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station’s Missoula Fire Sciences Lab, the University of Maryland’s Department of Fire Protection Engineering, and the University of Kentucky’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Kozo Saito, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Institute of Research for Technology Development (IR4TD), and Nelson Akafuah, assistant research professor of mechanical engineering, led UK’s efforts. UK graduate students Brittany Adam and Justin English also worked on the project and were listed as authors on the study.

Previous studies focused mainly on radiant heat so little was known about the respective roles of convection and radiation on fire spread and most often the assumption was made that radiant heat was the governing factor. But scientists recently found that the net rates of heat transferred by radiation are insufficient because the fine fuel particles that constitute wildland vegetation cool efficiently by convection until contacted by flame.

From Phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2015-07-reveal-wildfires.html