Enhancement: Importing FastFuels

[emanuelegissi]

From Eric:

script to turn the 3D voxel data into FDS input data. The first step is to download voxel data from the FastFuels website. I’ve attached the downloaded data for a test I am working on, in case you want to try that first. There are then two scripts. They both need to point to the ‘voxels’ folder at the top of the fuel data file tree.

The second script ‘zarr2fdsInput.py’ creates input text that you would then paste into an FDS input file. It uses surface-area-to-volume-ratio (SAV) to determine if there are multiple types/species of vegetation. Then for each type of vegetation, it determines where it should be placed in 3D space. It is not very flexible at the moment. For example, it assumes the user has defined certain materials etc. in their own input file.

https://github.com/teamholtz/FastFuels-Python

for_emanuele_v2 (1).zip

[ericvmueller]

In addition to the approach of writing all of the vegetation information directly to the input file, there is also now the ability to read in binary files:
https://github.com/firemodels/cad/tree/master/Binary_Bulk_Density_File

The format of the files is described in the User Guide, and there is a simple verification case:
https://github.com/firemodels/fds/blob/master/Verification/WUI/bulk_density_file.fds

The example works with a numpy array, but it can easily be converted to work with a zarr array from FastFuels (I can send you an example if you want). The FastFuels team is also working to give an option to download the pre-formatted binary files for FDS direct from their website, bypassing this step.
But the concept works for any 3D data on fuel arrangement, so it shouldn't be difficult if we want to allow users to import their own 3D data into qgis2fds and have it create the binary files for them.