Congratulations to Dr. Sriram Bharath Hariharan, postdoctoral scholar and Joseph Dowling, PhD candidate on their Combustion Art submission “Walls of Fire” which was selected for the Technical Merit Award in the 12th US National Combustion Meeting!

Walls of Fire
by Sriram Bharath Hariharan, Joseph L. Dowling, Michael J. Gollner
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of California, Berkeley

Fire whirls can form under a variety of different flow conditions. One common flow condition that results in their formation is the presence of multiple line fires, which cause buoyant plumes (walls) to surround a central pseudo enclosure. The low pressure in this region is conducive to the entrainment of swirling flow, resulting in the formation of a fire whirl. This image shows a laboratory study of this configuration, formed using a fuel pool 10 cm in diameter, surrounded by four line fires, all with n-heptane. This image was captured using a Nikon D500 at f/14 with an exposure time of 1/800 s.
The authors thank the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (140E0121C0004) for supporting this work.