Fire Images and Videos
Shattering Fire
Winner of Art Competition in 2018 Chinese National Combustion Meeting
Fire can shatter glass. Once shattered, the entrainment of fresh air significantly accelerates the development of the compartment fires and façade fires. To quantify the vulnerability of glass under fire, a toughened glass pane (100 cm x 100 cm x 0.6 cm) was tested under the attack of a heptane pool fire (maximum 500 kW). The fire development and heat release rate (HRR) were recorded.
as well as their interaction. The HRR of fire overlaps with the damage of glass. Once the fire breaks the glass pane, it transitions from being ventilation controlled to being fuel controlled. Such change may result in a strong impact on structural response and fire spread, an issue that has long been ignored. Therefore, we present this fire image to highlight the interaction between fire and structure and call for more attention The image demonstrates the evolution of the glass structural stability and fire .on this important fire safety issue.
Frolicking Flames
Dripping of molten fuel can change fire behaviors, ignite nearby materials and expand fire size. Dripping occurs when gravity overcomes the resistance from surface tension and viscous forces. It involves a complex phase-change process and is most common in fires of electrical wires and heat insulation materials. The image shows the dripping of molten polyethylene insulation in an electrical wire fire. Dripping first ignited the sand soaked with alcohol, and then, started to dance (interact) with the puffing pool fire. The entire 6-step dance lasted less than 0.2 s, and was captured by a high-speed camera (500 fps).
Flame Eclipse
Winner of Art Competition in 2017 American Microgravity Meeting
Fire safety in microgravity has always been a concern in space travel. Very few flame-spread experiments have been conducted in spacecraft environments because of the high cost of long-term microgravity facilities. The presented fire image shows a microgravity flame-spread experiments, conducted in the International Space Station.
The flame spread over black PMMA rod was tested under both concurrent and opposed flows. The central fire image shows a vapor jet disrupting the blue flame in the concurrent flow. The surrounding fire images show the opposed flame spread under a low oxygen concentration of 17%. The interval between these images is 1 minute. As the opposed flow slowly decreases from 7.6 cm/s to 0.7 cm/s, the flame changes from yellow to blue and becomes wider. The flame spread rate first increases, and then decreases until extinction.
Open-Access Data and Code
This is the TGA-GA code programmed in Matlab for obtaining solid-phase kinetic parameters through inverse modelling of thermogravimetic (TG) data via genetic algorithm (GA). It is written by Xinyan Huang and Guillermo Rein and it is based on the following journal papers:
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X. Huang, G. Rein (2016) Thermochemical Conversion of Biomass in Smouldering Combustion across Scales: the Roles of Heterogeneous Kinetics, Oxygen and Transport Phenomena, Bioresource Technology 207: 409-421. doi:10.1016/j.biortech.2016.01.027
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X. Huang, G. Rein (2014) Smouldering Combustion of Peat: Inverse Modelling of the Thermal and Oxidative Degradation Kinetics, Combustion and Flame 161 (6): 1633-1644. doi:10.1016/j.combustflame.2013.12.013
Contact authors at xy.huang@polyu.edu.hk and g.rein@imperial.ac.uk
File published under a Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0
Gpyro Input File to Simulate Smoldering Combustion of Peat
The input files are used in the following papers to simulate the ignition, spread and extinction of Smouldering Peat Fires.
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X. Huang, G. Rein, H. Chen (2015) Computational Smouldering Combustion: Predicting the Roles of Moisture and Inert Contents in Peat Wildfires, Proc Combust Inst, 35 (3): 2673-2681. Most download paper & IAFSS Best Poster Award
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X. Huang, G.Rein (2015) Computational Study of Critical Moisture and Depth of Burn in Peat Fires, Int J Wildland Fire, 24: 798-808.
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X. Huang, G. Rein (2016) Thermochemical Conversion of Biomass in Smouldering Combustion across Scales: the Roles of Heterogeneous Kinetics, Oxygen and Transport Phenomena, Biores Tech 207: 409-421. Selected as Journal Cover
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X. Huang, G. Rein (2016) Interactions of Earth Atmospheric Oxygen and Fuel Moisture in Smouldering Wildfires, Sci Total Environ, 572: 1440–1446.
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X. Huang, G. Rein (2017) Downward Spread of Smoldering Peat Fire: the Role of Moisture, Density and Oxygen Supply, Int J Wildland Fire, 26, 907-918. Editor’s Choice for Free Open Access
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X. Huang, G. Rein (2018) Upward-and-downward Spread of Smoldering Peat Fire, Proc Combust Inst (in press).
File published under a Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0
Gpyro Input File for Simulating Pyrolysis under Cone Calorimeter
The pyrolysis process under cone calorimeter is a typical coupling problem between heat transfer and heterogeneous reactions. To simulate this pyrolysis process, please refer to the following two papers for more details.
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X. Huang, K. Li, H. Zhang (2017) Modelling Bench-scale Fire on Engineered Wood: Effects of Transient Flame and Physicochemical Properties, Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, 36(2): 3167-3175.
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K. Li, X. Huang, C.M. Fleischmann, G. Rein, J. Ji (2014) Pyrolysis of Medium-Density Fiberboard: Optimized Search for Kinetic Scheme and Parameters via a Genetic Algorithm Driven by Kissinger’s Method, Energy Fuels, 28: 6130-6139.
File published under a Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0