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An experimental study of acoustically driven medium-scale pool fires

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Abstract

A set of experiments has been conducted on a medium-scale propane fueled pool fire acoustically forced in order to facilitate repeatable measurements defining the flame’s transient behavior. The fuel flow was slightly perturbed at the pool fire’s natural frequency by a sine waveform driven with a loudspeaker which was installed under the burner. As a result of the perturbation, the puffing behavior of the pool fire and the fire shape were modified. As the magnitude of the sine wave was increased larger perturbations were clearly observed, based on the measurement of the radiative heat flux and image analysis. Temperature and soot volume fractions were measured along the center line and throughout a slice of the flame. The soot volume fractions in the flame region are in good agreement with the data of other researchers. The reproducibility of these measurements was established through several experiments. The acoustically driven flame provides the possibility of more repeatable measurements of the transient behavior of these pool fires.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Andong National University, Andong, 760-749, Korea

    Ki Yong Lee

  2. Building and Fire Research Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, 20899-8663, USA

    Andrew Lock & Anthony Hamins

Authors
  1. Ki Yong Lee
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  2. Andrew Lock
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  3. Anthony Hamins
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ki Yong Lee.

Additional information

This paper was recommended for publication in revised form by Associate Editor Oh Chae Kwon

Ki Yong Lee received B.S. from Inha University in 1986 and M.S. and Ph.D in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA in 1992 and 1995. He is currently Professor at ME, Andong National University, Korea. His research interests are in pollutant formation during hazardous waste incineration, reduction of detailed chemical kinetic mechanism and their application, investigation of NOx reduction in an acoustic and an electric field, fluid dynamics of multiphase chemically reacting flows.

Andrew Lock graduated as a mechanical engineer from the University of Illinois in 2002. He received his Master’s degree in 2004, and his Ph.D in 2007 from the same school. He joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2007 where he worked on projects in thermal imaging camera characterization, full scale fire behavior, and underventilated compartment fires. He has conducted and published papers on numerous bench scale, room scale, and field fire experiments related to combustion and fire dynamics.

Anthony Hamins is Chief of the Fire Research Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Prior to joining NIST in 1989, Hamins was a Postdoctoral Research Engineer at the University of California at San Diego and a Research Scientist in the Chemistry Department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. His research interests include measurement science applied to heat and mass transfer in fires of multiple scales, fire investigation, combustion kinetics, fire model validation, and structural fire resistance.

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Lee, K.Y., Lock, A. & Hamins, A. An experimental study of acoustically driven medium-scale pool fires. J Mech Sci Technol 25, 2035–2041 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-011-0627-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12206-011-0627-1

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