Examining the effect of different landscape designs to arrest the motion of embers

Description:

During bushfires, ember attacks stand out as the primary contributor to house losses in the wildland-urban interface, surpassing damage caused by radiant heat and direct flame contact. However, there has been relatively little focus on studying ember storms and exploring potential strategies to mitigate ember hazards in residential areas, compared to other factors contributing to building losses. This is mainly due to the challenges of studying the motion of clusters of ember particles, especially through laboratory and field experiments. With the advancement of computational techniques and facilities, it is now feasible to study complex dynamics systems through numerical simulations. 

To reduce the structural damage from radiant heat, suburban areas are typically separated from forests by a cleared area known as an asset protection zone (APZ). However, ember particles can swiftly traverse the APZ and reach residential areas, leading to significant damage through ember attacks. Creating turbulence in the APZ could intercept the embers, potentially causing them to self-extinguish before reaching the residential area. Therefore, this project aims to study the effective ways of creating turbulence in APZ through innovative landscape design solutions to mitigate the ember hazards in residential areas, utilising numerical simulations. The specific project objectives include: 

1. To explore how ember particle movement can be disrupted by implementing two distinct landscape designs: clusters of rocks in different sizes and individual rocks arranged in a check pattern.
2. To investigate the effectiveness of the landscape designs in objective 1 under various wind conditions.
3. To explore the ideal location of the landscape designs in objective 1 for three types of forest densities: sparse, dense, and dense with shrub cover.