The size and mass distribution of firebrands collected from ignited building components exposed to wind

Wildfires that spread into communities, commonly referred to as Wildland-Urban Interface fires (WUI), are a significant international problem. Post-fire damage studies have suggested for some time that firebrands are a significant cause of structure ignition in WUI fires, yet little research has been conducted to investigate firebrand production from burning vegetation and structures. To this end, firebrand production from real-scale building components under well-controlled laboratory conditions was investigated. Specifically, wall and re-entrant corner assemblies were ignited and during the combustion process, firebrands were collected to determine the size/mass distribution generated from such real-scale building components under varying wind speed. Finally, the size and mass distributions of firebrands collected in this study were compared with the data from an actual full-scale structure burn to determine if simple component tests such as these can provide insights into firebrand generation data from full-scale structures. The results are presented and discussed.