Entropy Generation Analysis of Wildfire Propagation

Entropy generation is commonly applied to describe the evolution of irreversible processes, such as heat transfer and turbulence. These are both dominating phenomena in fire propagation. In this paper, entropy generation analysis is applied to a grassland fire event, with the aim of finding possible links between entropy generation and propagation directions. The ultimate goal of such analysis consists in helping one to overcome possible limitations of the models usually applied to the prediction of wildfire propagation. These models are based on the application of the superimposition of the effects due to wind and slope, which has proven to fail in various cases. The analysis presented here shows that entropy generation allows a detailed analysis of the landscape propagation of a fire and can be thus applied to its quantitative description.