Comparative Study of Computational Electromagnetics Applied to Radiowave Propagation in Wildfires

In this paper, a comparative study of four computational electromagnetic techniques to model the 2-dimensional radiowave propagation phenomena in wildfires, is proposed. The fire dynamics for a small tree specimen is studied, in which gases released from the combustion process are used to investigate the generation of an ionised plasma and, thus, to evaluate the gradient of the medium refractive index using the cold plasma model. Consequently, the presence of fire has been demonstrated to introduce additional losses in the radio path that may be critical to radio communication systems that are widely used in mission critical applications. The gradient of the refractive index across the vegetation volume yielded by the cold plasma model is used as input parameter to different numerical methods and electromagnetic solvers at 385 MHz (i.e. TETRA frequency band in Portugal) and, subsequently, their applicability to wildfires is assessed.