Bushfire-induced winds and their impacts on buildings

![CDATA[Bushfire, or brush fire, is a natural phenomenon that occurs frequently in many places around the world, given favourable weather and fuel conditions, and ignition mechanisms naturally occurring, such as lightning, or manmade, such as fallen transmission lines. Most bushfires are dealt with and controlled by the various fire services at their early stages of development. However, bushfires which are difficult to control and with major fire runs, often in inaccessible areas, can develop into ragging catastrophic infernos causing widespread property damages and loss of lives, such as the recent Black Saturday Bushfire that claimed 173 lives and more than 2000 propetiies in Victoria, Australia on 7 February 2009. While considerable efforts have focused on the principal agents of bushfire attack, including embers, radiant heat and flame contact, more research is needed to study the characteristics of bushfire-induced winds and their impacts on buildings. Design and construction practices, such as those applied through the Building Code of Australia (ABCB, 20 I 0), provide some guidelines for improved building resilience in the face of bushfire attack (AS3959, 2009), however, wind loading does not form part of this assessment process. This paper presents the results of an investigation using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to study the characteristics of bushfire-induced winds and the wind load effects on buildings.]]