(71h) Development of Large-Scale Fire Whirls for Offshore Oil Spill Cleaning

Fire whirls are a phenomenon that can intensify combustion, often formed in uncontrolled situations such as wildfires. Researchers have begun to explore the potential of harnessing this phenomenon in order to enhance combustion, increase burn efficiencies and reduce pollution. The fire whirl provides a method to promote oxygen entrainment though circulation to provide a more efficient burn, and increase heating rates to the fuel surface thereby removing more spilled fuel, resulting in less environmentally harmful burn products and residues. The potential for reduced combustion emissions as well as high efficiency burns creates a motivation to understand these dynamics at large-scale for the full implications of this phenomenon. Most knowledge of fire whirls has come from laboratory-scale experiments with a focus on scaling laws to predict their formation and structure, with some success in scaling up these approaches to large-scale observations. Only a limited subset of these experiments has captured emissions. However, these results have shown improved efficiencies suggesting the need for scale-up testing to verify this phenomenon. The current study will perform the largest fire whirl test to this point, utilizing a 1.2-meter diameter pool of HOOPS crude oil to establish the conditions necessary for a fire whirl to form outdoors at large-scale. Three sidewalls will be used to induce the circulation necessary through natural entrainment. Emissions will be measured using a UAV flying over the experiments as well as thermal, flow, and video measurements of the fire whirls. The successful execution of this experiment will provide the potential for cleaner burns in situations such as large oil spills on the ocean, releasing less harmful byproducts and less soot into the air.