Moisture content thresholds for ignition and rate of fire spread for various dead fuels in northeast forest ecosystems of China

Fuel moisture content is one of the important factors that determine ignition probability and fire behaviour in forest ecosystems.In this study,ignition and fire spread moisture content thresholds of 40 dead fuel were performed in laboratory experiments,with a focus on the source of ignition and wind speed.Variability in fuel moisture content at time of ignition and during fire spread was observed for different fuels.Matches were more efficient to result in ignition and spread fire with high values of fuel moisture content compared to the use of cigarette butts.Some fuels did not ignite at 15%moisture content,whereas others ignited at 40%moisture content and fire spread at 38%moisture content in the case of matches,or ignited at 27%moisture content and spread fire at 25%moisture content using cigarette butts.A two-way ANOVA showed that both the source of ignition and the wind speed affected ignition and fire spread threshold significantly,but there was no interaction between these factors.The relationship between ignition and fire spread was strong,with R2=98%for cigarette butts,and 92%for matches.Further information is needed,especially on the density of fuels,fuel proportion(case of mixed fuels),fuel age,and fuel combustibility.

Research on the energy evolution characteristics and the failure intensity of rocks

It is pretty challenging and difficult to quantitatively evaluate the intensity of dynamic disasters in deep mining engineering.Based on the uniaxial loading-unloading experiments for five types of rocks,this paper investigated the energy evolution characteristics,and identified the damage and crack propagation thresholds.Also,the fragment size distributions of the rocks after failure were analyzed.The energy release rate(Ge)and energy dissipation rate(Gd)were then proposed to describe the change of energies per unit volume and per unit strain.Results demonstrated that the more brittle rocks had the shorter stage of unstable crack growth and the lower induced damage at crack damage thresholds.The evolution characteristics of the strain energy rates can be easily identified by the crack propagation thresholds.The failure intensity index(FId),which equals to the values of Ge/Gd at the failure point,was further put forth.It can account for the brittleness of the rocks,the intensity of rock failure as well as the degree of rock fragmentation.It was revealed that a higher FId corresponded to a lower fractal dimension and stronger dynamic failure.

Modeling the COVID-19 epidemic and awareness diffusion on multiplex networks

The coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19)has been widely spread around the world,and the control and behavior dynamics are still one of the important research directions in the world.Based on the characteristics of COVID-19’s spread,a coupled disease-awareness model on multiplex networks is proposed in this paper to study and simulate the interaction between the spreading behavior of COVID-19 and related information.In the layer of epidemic spreading,the nodes can be divided into five categories,where the topology of the network represents the physical contact relationship of the population.The topological structure of the upper network shows the information interaction among the nodes,which can be divided into aware and unaware states.Awareness will make people play a positive role in preventing the epidemic diffusion,influencing the spread of the disease.Based on the above model,we have established the state transition equation,through the microscopic Markov chain approach(MMCA),and proposed the propagation threshold calculation method under the epidemic model.Furthermore,MMCA iteration and the Monte Carlo method are simulated on the static network and dynamic network,respectively.The current results will be beneficial to the study of COVID-19,and propose a more rational and effective model for future research on epidemics.