Experimental Study on Flame Merging Phenomenon

Abstract

No less than 350 housing fires happened each year during 2016-2021 in DKI Jakarta. Fatality is fortunately not a common issue, but it was predicted that 200 billion rupiahs losses annually from the fires. Narrow spaces with a bulk of people housing make the fire spread faster. Fire burns, whichever is the ‘ready-to-burn’ first, so it cannot be expected one house is already burned out first, then the fire will continue to the next house. From this phenomenon, it potentially has more than one hotspot from the fire that can grow bigger with a flame merging situation. For a better understanding of fire merging phenomenon, experimental study was reported in this work. The study was conducted on a laboratory scale experiment with the variation of the separation distance between the fire sources. The separation distance was set to be 0; 5; 10 cm. The fire source was shredded paper which is placed in cylindrical baskets having diameters of 5 cm, 10 cm, and 15 cm. The experimental data were recorded by using K-type thermocouple, visual and thermal cameras, and a scale. The results show that the probability of flame merging increases with the diameter of baskets. The temperature and flame height increase as the flame merging phenomenon occurs. However, flame merging does not have a direct impact on combustion efficiency based on this experiment.