A Global Kinetic Model for the Combustion of the Evolved Gases in Wildland Fires

Abstract

The analysis of combustion kinetics in the gas-phase is decisive for wild land fire behavior modeling. However, the use of detailed reaction mechanisms, which involves a large number of species and reactions, is impractical due to large computational time requirements. The present work proposes a five-step chemical kinetic mechanism to simulate the gas phase combustion processes taking place in wildland fires. Both experimental data and data from simulations run using the PSR code from the CHEMKIN-II package with a detailed kinetic mechanism (GDF-kin 3.0) have been used to calibrate and evaluate the global model under typical wild land fire conditions in terms of the inlet mixture composition, equivalence ratio, and range of temperatures.

Keywords:

• Gas-phase combustion
• Global reaction mechanism
• Reaction kinetics
• Wildland fires

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by the Agencenationale de la recherche (ANR), under the project ANR-09-COSI-006, and by the Centre National de la RechercheScientifique (CNRS).