Comparison of three methods to quantify the fire spread rate in laboratory experiments

Different methods can be used to measure the time and distance of travel of a fire and thus its speed. The selection of a particular method will depend on the experimental objectives, design, scale, location (in the laboratory or field), required accuracy and resources available. In this study, measurements from ocular observation (directly by eye), visible spectrum video imagery and thermocouple instrumentation were used to compare their performance in quantifying the time of arrival and rate of spread of a fire burning across a eucalypt forest litter fuel bed in a combustion wind tunnel. All methods gave similar results, but there were some significant differences depending on the dryness of the fuel and speed of the wind.