Quantification of convective heat transfer inside tree structures

Convective heat transfer between a vegetal structure and its surrounding medium remains poorly described. However, for some applications, such as forest fire propagation studies, convective heat transfer is one of the main factors responsible for vertical fire transitions, from ground level to the tree crowns. These fires are the most dangerous because their rates of spread can reach high speeds, around one meter per second. An accurate characterization of this transfer is therefore important for fire propagation modelling. This study presents an attempt to formulate a theoretical modelling of the convective heat transfer coefficient for vegetal structures generated using an Iterated Function Systems (IFS). This model depends on the IFS parameters. The results obtained using this approach were compared with previously computed numerical results in order to evaluate their accuracy. The maximal discrepancies were found to be around 12% which proves the efficiency of the present model.