Practical Scheme for Calculating the Fire-Induced Winds in the October 20, 1991 Oakland Hills Fire.
Practical Scheme for Calculating the Fire-Induced Winds
in the October 20, 1991 Oakland Hills Fire.
(508 K)
Trelles, J. J.; Pagni, P. J.
U.S./Japan Government Cooperative Program on Natural
Resources (UJNR). Fire Research and Safety. 12th Joint
Panel Meeting. October 27-November 2, 1992, Tsukuba,
Japan, Building Research Inst., Ibaraki, Japan Fire
Research Inst., Tokyo, Japan, 297-305 pp, 1992.
Sponsor:
National Institute of Standards and Technology,
Gaithersburg, MD
Keywords:
fire safety; fire research; wind effects; wind
direction; wind velocity; equations; expansion;
vorticity
Abstract:
This research is based on the model developed by Howard
Baum and Bernard McCaffrey. As a first step, a
consistent set of characteristic scales are chosen to
nondimensionalize all physical parameters and variables.
The greatest advantage obtained by the following choice
of nondimensionalization is that, once one has solved
for the flow field induced by a single fire, the field
produced by a series of fires is given by physically
scaling each fire and then vectorially adding all the
influences at a point. The nominal heat release, the
ambient density, the ambient temperature, the specific
heat, and the acceleration of gravity, are used to
determine characteristic quantities, which are
subscripted with a "c". The expressions for the
characteristic length, velocity, vorticity, potential,
and Stokes stream function, are given in Eq. (1). All
the subsequent nondimensional quantities - superscripted
with an asterisk - are obtained by dividing the
dimensional quantity by the characteristic quantity.
Building and Fire Research Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899