UC Riverside

The interaction of converging fires often leads to significant changes in fire behavior, including increased flame length, angle, and intensity. In this paper, the fluid mechanics of two adjacent line fires are studied both theoretically and experimentally. A simple potential flow model is used to explain the tilting of interacting flames towards each other, which results from a momentum imbalance triggered by fire geometry. The model was validated by measuring the velocity field surrounding stationary alcohol pool fires. The flow field was seeded with high-contrast colored smoke, and the motion of smoke structures was analyzed using a cross-correlation optical flow technique. The measured velocities and flame angles are found to compare reasonably with the predicted values, and an analogy between merging fires and wind-blown flames is proposed.