Study of flame height of aviation fuel pool fires

Aviation fuel pool fire experiments with and without cross wind were carried out in the Wind Tunnel of the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science. Image processing technology based on MATLAB program was built to analyze the flame height of aviation fuel with and without cross wind. In these experiments, the diameters of circular pools are 015, 020, 030 and 060 m and the cross wind speed ranges from quiescence to 35 m/s. The dimensionless number—Richardson number (Ri) was used to analyze the effect of cross wind on pool fires. The result shows that there is a critical value of Ri-1. When Ri-1 increases within the critical value, dimensionless flame height linearity decreases with ln Ri-1. When Ri-1 exceeds this value, the flame configuration remains steady. The critical value of Ri-1increases with pool diameter, however, the steady dimensionless flame height decreases with pool diameter. The relation between flame height without cross wind and pool diameter and burning rate was achieved by theoretical analysis, which shows that the dimensionless flame height Hf/D linearly changes with the Fc number to the power 2/3, and the values of some parameters were obtained by experiment data. Semi-empirical models were also developed to predict the flame height under windy conditions.