Probabilistic aspect of fire whirl generation around an L-shaped fire source in a crosswind

Abstract Fire whirls can be generated during large outdoor fires such as post-earthquake urban fires, and their consequences are often devastating. Therefore, when assessing the post-earthquake fire risk in urban areas, the conditions of fire whirls generation must be understood. There have been attempts to determine the critical crosswind velocity that maximizes the occurrence of fire whirls. However, it does not account for the substantially varying frequency of fire whirl generation among different cases. From a fire-risk perspective, steadily generated fire whirls need to be distinguished from intermittently generated ones, but such a distinction has not been attempted to date. In this study, the probabilistic aspect of fire whirl generation around an L-shaped gas burner in a crosswind was experimentally investigated in a wind tunnel. The test parameters were the heat release rate per unit length (32.5–86.8 kW/m) and the crosswind velocity (0.115–0.696 m/s). Fire whirl was observed in 10 out of 19 cases, but the duration period (i.e., frequency) of the fire whirl generation varied substantially among the cases. The variation of the generation frequency was successfully generalized by the Froude number, Fr, a characteristic value of the counter-flow around the fire source. The Strouhal number, St, which is often used to characterize periodic pulsation of buoyant diffusion flames, was also found to be an appropriate value characterizing the coherency within the unsteady fire whirl generation phenomena.