Improving the accuracy of the fire behaviour metric 'fireline intensity' for Australian fuels

This project concept was submitted by NSW Rural Fire Service.

The project aims to:

1. Review existing literature
   Identify Australian fuel types and key species lacking known heat of combustion values and document current state of knowledge.
    
2. Conduct combustion experiments
   a) Develop a standardised method for determining the rate and nature of heat release replicating real-word bushfire spread.
   
   b) Investigate key fuel types (including but not exclusively wet forest, dry forest, grass, heath and pine) under varying environmental conditions e.g. varying curing and different fine fuel moisture to determine the rate and nature of heat release. This will include collecting and analysing data on moisture of extinction, fireline intensity, ignitability, total heat release, combustion efficiency and the proportion of heat released in smouldering combustion.
   
   c) if possible, examine different strata from fuel types (e.g. surface, near-surface, elevated and canopy).
    
3. Improve Australian fuel heat release models
   Make recommendations based on outputs from the combustion experiments that can be related to field-based observations leading to direct improvements to a range of fire and land management decision-making products. By increasing the accuracy of measures of fireline intensity, this will contribute to more consistent fire behaviour model outputs and hence fire danger ratings within the Australian Fire Danger Rating System (AFDRS) across different fuel types. Furthermore, this research will have implications relating to smoke, carbon release, fire impacts and fire research focusing on fire-atmosphere interactions.