Abstract
This paper reports a series of scale-model experiments of wind-generated fire whirls that occurred in the Hifukusho-ato area shortly after the Great Kanto Earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. The conditions of the scale-model experiments are determined based on scaling consideration. Since it was difficult to make the fuel Froude number (or dimensionless heat release rate) of the scale model equal to that of the prototype, it is proposed to relax the scaling requirement. Then, the Froude number based on the flame height is used to determine the lateral wind velocity of the scale model. The flame height is chosen to be the important length scale because it significantly influences the magnitude of buoyant flow velocity. The scale-model experiments reproduced similar fire whirls to those observed in the Hifukusho-ato area and those reported in our earlier studies.
Keywords
- Scale Model
- Heat Release Rate
- Duty Ratio
- Flame Height
- Burning Area
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported in part by Japan’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (19860021), in part by the Promotion Program for Fire and Disaster Prevention Technologies, Fire and Disaster Management Agency, Japan, and in part by a general fund from University of Kentucky’s Institute of Research for Technology Development.
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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Kuwana, K., Sekimoto, K., Saito, K. (2015). Section B Fire and Explosion - Scale-Model Experiment of Wind-Generated Fire Whirls. In: Saito, K., Ito, A., Nakamura, Y., Kuwana, K. (eds) Progress in Scale Modeling, Volume II. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10308-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10308-2_13
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