Advanced Modelling of Firebrand Behaviour to Improve the Fire Safety of Timber Buildings

Firebrand-driven ignition is a major pathway for the escalation of wildfires and urban fires. Firebrands can travel long distances and ignite multiple sites, allowing fires to breach control lines and grow from local incidents to city-scale conflagrations. As European cities expand the use of mass timber to meet climate goals, the behaviour of timber firebrands becomes a critical safety issue, yet it remains poorly characterised compared with embers from vegetation. FORT adopts an interdisciplinary approach that integrates fire dynamics, structural engineering, and artificial intelligence to study firebrand generation, transport, deposition, and ignition in mass-timber building fires. The project establishes an integrated framework under realistic conditions, combining multi-scale experiments on timber assemblies, advanced diagnostics and image analysis, statistical characterisation and modelling, machine learning for generation models, and physics-based simulations for transport and ignition, all validated against laboratory and field observations. Outputs will include predictive tools with quantified uncertainty and open datasets and code compliant with the FAIR principles. These results will inform façade protection, building spacing, evacuation planning, and risk analysis for dense urban areas and the wildland urban interface. By closing key knowledge gaps and aligning open science with collaboration across academia, industry, and authorities, the work advances understanding of multi-scale fire dynamics and delivers actionable guidance for performance-based design, regulation, and standards, supporting climate-resilient, fire-safe timber construction.