The main aim of the present work is studying the effects of swirl number and equivalence ratio on the combustion characteristics of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for normal diffusion flame (the NDF) and inverse diffusion flame (the IDF). The effects of different swirl numbers of 0.5, 0.75,1.0, and 1.5 are studied at an equivalence ratio of 1.0. In addition, the effect of different equivalence ratios of 0.75, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 at a swirl number of 0.5 were studied. The flame shape, visible flame length, temperature distributions and species concentrations were measured. To study the above parameters, a test rig that consists of an air supply line, a fuel supply line, and a burner head was designed and constructed. The results showed that, by increasing the swirl number, the visible flame length is decreased for the IDF and the NDF. Moreover, by increasing the equivalence ratio Φ, the visible flame length, for the IDF, was increased by about 39%, 91%, 108%, and 620% for air swirl number 0.5, 0.75, 1.0 and 1.5, respectively. However, the maximum temperature decreased. It was, also, found that the concentrations of NO, CO 2 and CO were increased until reach their maximum value. While the concentrations of O 2 were decreased. The maximum value of the NO for the IDF is found to be 35 ppm, while for the NDF is 245 ppm. In addition, it was found that the IDF emitted less CO and NO than the NDF did. Therefore, it is more suitable for environmental preservation.