Sponsors

Domingos Xavier Viegas, Emeritus Professor at the University of Coimbra, Portugal

 

Short Biography: Domingos Xavier Viegas is Professor Emeritus at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and a member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences. Within the ADAI (UC), he coordinates the Forest Fire Research Centre (CEIF).
Since 1985, he has been dedicated to research on forest fires, with the support of a multidisciplinary team, focusing on topics related to integrated fire management, with particular emphasis on the study of fire behavior and personal safety. He founded the Forest Fire Research Laboratory (LEIF) and has participated in over 100 European and National projects. He is the author or co-author of 130 international papers and has supervised more than 20 doctoral dissertations.
He has led his team in the preparation of various reports, commissioned by the Portuguese government and other countries, on major fires and personal accidents.
He promoted the International Conference on Forest Fire Research and chaired its ten editions.
He was awarded the Fire Safety and the Ember Award, by the IAWF in 2017 and in 2022.

Short Summary: The research carried out by the author and his team during the past years has highlighted the dynamic character of wildfire behaviour, derived from the interaction between the fire and its surrounding atmosphere. One interesting property of the temporal evolution of the rate of spread (ROS) is its oscillatory character in the whole range of fire dimensions, related to the dynamic behaviour of fire. The amplitude and frequency of ROS oscillations depend on the boundary conditions of the fire, namely on its dimensions. In certain conditions, as in the case of eruptive fires in canyons, or junction fires, the fire may undergo a great acceleration, followed by a deceleration that have great impact in fire safety and fire management. These processes are well described by the mathematical model for fire acceleration induced by the surrounding flow. The pioneer work that is carried out by the author and his team on the fire spread in a thermally stratified boundary layer at laboratory scale confirms the need to consider the interaction between the fire and the surrounding flow and underscores the relevance of including the atmospheric stability as a parameter in the analysis and modelling of large wildfires.