Satoh K, Liu NA, Liu Q, Yang KT, Asme (2008) 'Numerical and experimental study of merging fires in square arrays.' (Amer Soc Mechanical Engineers: New York) 461-472

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Abstract: In large-scale forest fires and city fires, merging fires and fire whirls have often been observed, which cause substantial casualties and property damages. It is important to know particularly where and tinder what conditions of weather such merging fires and fire whirls appear in cities or forests. However, there have been no adequate answers, since the detailed physical characteristics about them are not fully clarified yet although previous studies have examined the phenomena of merging flames. Therefore, we have carried out preliminary studies and found that the merged tall fires can enhance the fire spread, and developed a method to analyze bum-out data of fire arrays. If sufficient knowledge can be obtained by relevant experiments and numerical computations, it may be possible to mitigate the damages due to merged fires and fire whirls. The objective of this study is to investigate the merging conditions of fires in square arrays in laboratory experiments and also by CFD numerical simulations, varying the size of square array, inter-fire distance and heat release rate, to judge 'unmerged' or 'merged' conditions in the fire array. It has been found that the fire merging is dependent on the inter-fire distance in the army and also on the total heat release rate of all fires surrounding the center region of the army. Also found that the experimental and simulated results on the merged and unmerged cases in the fire array, as affected by the total heat release rate and the inter-fire distance, which control the convective gas flow into the army, behave very similarly. Therefore, it can be concluded that the fire merging in army fires are highly based on the convection in the flow field due to fires and can be predicted by simple CFD simulations.