Discovery Of ‘Blue Whirl’: New Kind Of Fire With Extraordinary Properties That Can Help Improve Our Environment

MessageToEagle.com – Scientists have discovered the so-called ‘Blue Whirl’ flame, a new kind of fire with extraordinary properties that can help us improve our environment.

The refined flame is based on fire whirls, which naturally occur when rising heat and turbulent winds combine to create a thin tornado of flames. When creating fire whirls in the lab, researchers suddenly spotted the blue whirl flame, which has never before been observed.

The discovery of a type of fire tornado could lead to beneficial new approaches for reducing carbon emissions and improving oil spill cleanup.

“A fire tornado has long been seen as this incredibly scary, destructive thing. But, like electricity, can you harness it for good? If we can understand it, then maybe we can control and use it. This is the first time fire whirls have been studied for their practical applications,” said fire protection engineer, Michael Gollner, from the University of Maryland.

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Some oil spill remediation techniques include corralling up the crude oil to create a thick layer on the water surface that can be burned in place, but the resulting combustion is smoky, inefficient, and incomplete. However, the Clark School researchers say blue whirls could improve remediation-by-combustion approaches by burning the oil layer with increased efficiency, reducing harmful emissions into the atmosphere around it and the ocean beneath it.

“Fire whirls are more efficient than other forms of combustion because they produce drastically increased heating to the surface of fuels, allowing them to burn faster and more completely. In our experiments over water, we’ve seen how the circulation fire whirls generate also helps to pull in fuels. If we can achieve a state akin to the blue whirl at larger scale, we can further reduce airborne emissions for a much cleaner means of spill cleanup,” explained Gollner.

Beyond improvements to fuel efficiency and oil spill remediation, there are currently few easy methods to generate a stable vortex in the lab, so the team hopes their discovery of the ‘blue swirl’ can serve as a natural research platform for the future study of vortices and vortex breakdown in fluid mechanics.

“A fire whirl is usually turbulent, but this blue whirl is very quiet and stable without visible or audible signs of turbulence,” said Huahua Xiao, assistant research scientist in the Clark School’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and corresponding author of the paper. “It’s really a very exciting discovery that offers important possibilities both within and outside of the research lab.”

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