Fire Whirl Experimental Facility with No Enclosure of Solid Walls: Design and Validation

In this work, a fire whirl facility with no enclosure of solid walls was designed, for experimental simulation of fire whirls in open field. Air curtains were used to produce the generating eddy of fire whirl. Tests were conducted to evaluate the capability of the new facility. It was found that there was an optimal tilt angle for the air curtains to produce stable fire whirls. Experiments of fire whirls under different pool diameters showed that the mass loss rate ṁ depended on the circulation by ṁ∼^1.18 and the dimensionless flame height satisfied H^*∼^*0.71 (where the asterisks denote dimensionless variables). It was also found that the ratio of the continuous flame height to the whole flame height for different pool diameters was 0.67. The centerline temperatures varied with the normalized height Z by Z^0.08 , Z^ - 1.30 and Z^ - 2.18 , respectively in the regions of the continuous flame, intermittent flame and plume. The radiative fraction was calculated to be close to 44