yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

These Indoor Wildfires Help Engineers Study the Real Thing | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Fire, especially wildfire, is a really complex phenomenon. I hear people talking about being able to control fire; I don't think that's something that will happen soon. But here we are, at least trying to understand fire. There are factors that affect fire from the individual leaf clear up to the top of the atmosphere.

The current model that we use to print helps us predict fire spread; it was about 40 years old. So what we're doing with these experiments is probing deeper and trying to provide more information about how fire spreads in wildlands. Today, we're going to run different types of experiments, and we're trying to understand under which conditions the fire, if it ignites on the surface, will transition and spread.

This is replicating dead fuels, which is typically on the ground. What catches easily on fire is the dead fuel. This one you see here with the leaves; this is what we call the live fuel. The live fuels are collected locally, so it's very important for us to study the specific fuel here because it's such a great contributor to the wildfires that we get in the region.

The wind tunnel is instrumented with a barrage of instruments that includes temperature probes or thermocouples, heat flux sensors, relative humidity sensors, and load cells that are measuring mass loss. If you are ready, we're right away once our computers are ready and our cameras all set. We're ready to ignite! Are we all ready?

Our study wants to focus on if the dead fuels do catch fire through lightning or a cigarette butt or something, whether that will transition to the actual live shrub. Once it gets to the live shrub, we want to know if it's going to spread throughout the whole shrub community. Today, we are varying wind speed in this experiment, applying more oxygen to the fire so it can consume fuels much faster.

In experiments where we have fire, it is much more intense; flame height is much higher. Wind will help those flames to be tilted, which will enable neighboring fuel to ignite faster. Eight hundred to fifteen hundred Fahrenheit. We worked with the Forest Service to provide them information that they need to manage the land.

Wind blowing this way, you've got flames that are able to go past this. Here in California, we have a condition called Santa Ana winds, which are high-speed winds that could cause destructive fires. Wind is probably one of the most important factors that affect fire spread.

We're modeling it to control as much as we can so we can really understand what the important variables are. Down the road, we hope to have a perfect computer model that we simply ask: if ignition occurs in this part of a forest under certain conditions, what will happen within the next 30 minutes? Within one hour, what would be the best way to deploy resources?

Global climate change is going to bring more wildfires with greater intensity in areas like Southern California. In order to combat them, we need to understand them, know how to predict them, and know how to fight them.

More Articles

View All
15 Things That Scream “I’m Low Class”
In Russia they’re called beadlow; in Australia they call them bogans; in Canada they’re called hosers; and in Germany they call them Kevin. Now really, they do. They like to say we live in a classless society, but we both know that’s not the case. Here ar…
Finding points with vertical tangents
Consider the closed curve in the xy plane given by this expression. Here, find the coordinates of the two points on the curve where the line tangent to the curve is vertical. So, pause this video and see if you could have a go at it. I don’t know what th…
Cecily Strong: Why I'm Involved | Years of Living Dangerously
Working in comedy, I spend all my off time watching a lot of documentaries. So this was so exciting! It’s like a little kid getting to jump into a video game. You’re the sunniest state, ignoring the sun. Exactly, the Sunshine State, and you’re not allowe…
Multiplication and division relationship for fractions
You are likely already familiar with the relationship between multiplication and division. For example, we know that three times six is equal to eighteen. But another way to express that same relationship is to say, “All right, if 3 times 6 is 18, then i…
EXCLUSIVE: How "Glowing" Sharks See Each Other | National Geographic
This amazing thing happened a few years ago. We accidentally found a fluorescent fish, and then that led us to over 200 fluorescent fish, including two species of sharks. I wanted to film these sharks in their natural world with the shark eye camera and s…
shower thoughts that really confuse me..
Wow, another shower thoughts video; who would have guessed? Not like the last two got a million views or anything. Look, I’m just trying to make people smile or something. You know, people say that a child’s laughter can light up your home, unless it’s 3:…