Experimental Understanding of Wildland Fires

The experimental study of wildland fires to better understand their behaviour and develop fire-spread models is a topic with an extensive literature. Experimental activities cover many subjects related to wildland fires including among others: fire behaviour, fire impact, fuel characterization, fire emissions and fire detection. This chapter focuses on the experiments conducted to understand fire behaviour and particularly the spreading and burning dynamics of the flame front. It first presents a historical description of the development of the experimental research on fire behaviour. Next, it describes the different scales of the physical and chemical phenomena driving fire behaviour. Then, the experimental activities are described at the different scales: the micro-scale, the small and large-scale laboratory scales and the field-scale.