Derivation and investigation of mathematical models for spotting in wildland fire

• Author / Creator

  Martin, Jonathan Michael

• Spotting in the context of wildland fire refers to the creation of new fires,
  downwind from an existing fire front, where the new fires result due to the
  launch, and subsequent fuel bed ignition upon landing, of burning plant ma-
  terial released from the main front. We will present a new integro-partial
  differential equation (i-PDE) model which includes both local spread, com-
  bustion/extinguishment, and non-local spread due to spotting. We will also
  present a new model for firebrand transport in the atmosphere, which allows us
  to incorporate existing physical or empirically-based submodels existing in the
  literature to obtain the spotting distribution. We will use the spottting distri-
  bution to investigate the problem of fire fronts breaching obstacles to local fire
  spread, such as a highway or river, and the spotfire distribution appears as a
  kernel for the integral term in our i-PDE model. We then investigate travelling
  wave solutions to the i-PDE model, demonstrating that spotting can increase
  the rate of spread, or cause acceleration of a fire front’s advance.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Fire
  • Models
  • Spotting

• Graduation date

  Fall 2013

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3P55DT3V

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.