Another dimension to wildfires: UB research making communities safer

By Peter Murphy

Szasdi’s research focuses primarily on the spatial and temporal progression of fire in WUI communities (urban communities near wildlands), areas that risk higher damage rates than in the past.

“Some of the affected communities are in the suburb of the cities, while the number of people living in these areas has increased in recent years,” Szasdi says. “With the new weather patterns and as the intensity of wildfires is increasing, we have started to see that thousands of homes in California and other states prone to wildfire are at risk of serious damage. The sprawling damage that we are observing in recent years was not a common pattern.”

Szasdi’s research is part of a collaboration between Negar Elhami Khorasani, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, research assistant professor Kang Sun and PhD student Nima Masoudvaziri. Szasdi presented their work at the 2019 international Fire Behavior and Fuels Conference. According to Elhami Khorasani, Szasdi has developed a unique model to simulate fire spread in these communities.

“There is currently no reliable model to simulate fire spread in WUI communities,” says Elhami Khorasani, “Fernando’s research results can be used in the future to identify vulnerable areas inside a community and propose mitigation actions to reduce the risk of fire.”

Szasdi and Elhami Khorasani both have structural engineering background, and examine the problem of wildfires from this perspective. “We wanted to explore solutions based on changes made in the layouts of communities or characteristics of individual structures,” Szasdi says.

The team first tested existing fire spread models by comparing model predictions to the actual damage in historic cases to determine how accurately these models predict the spread of wildfires in WUI. With the information necessary to run these models (community layout, building characteristics, humidity and wind velocity), Szasdi determined existing models do not accurately predict fire spread within WUI communities. “We found out that the models were not capturing the way in which the fire spreads very well,” Szasdi says “Our objective is to predict the number of structures that will ignite and the approximate location of those structures during a fire event.”

Szasdi B. admits that it is difficult to get an exact prediction, but his new physics-based model marks progress in this area. “The model is not complete yet, but it is developed to a point where it already predicts the fire spread much better than the existing simplified models” he says.

The new fire spread model examines each mechanism of fire spread independently, combining fire branding, fire expansion, thermal radiation and other factors, to determine the ignitions and behavior of fire in WUI communities.

At the conference, Szasdi received positive feedback on his proposed model, and is hoping to expand the model in future. Szasdi B. joined UB as a Fulbright scholar in 2017. Before joining the Department as a master’s student, he was the executive coordinator of the Guatemalan Society of Structural and Earthquake Engineering from 2015 – 2017 where he coordinated the development and publication of the Guatemalan Structural Safety code.