Published works

Wildland-urban interface areas are growing rapidly. Building standards are required to ensure that the structures built in fire prone areas are resilient to fire. Australian Standard AS 3959 was developed to prescribe construction requirements for houses in bushfire prone areas. The model in AS 3959 is applied to estimate the Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) that is expected on a structure during the nominally worst-case bushfire scenario that the house can experience. Once the BAL is based on the fuel and terrain near the structure, and determines the construction requirements for the structure. AS 3959 is based upon a view-factor model of radiant heat flux, which estimates the level of heat flux expected at the structure.