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Extinction of Wood Fire: A Near-Limit Blue Flame Above Hot Smoldering Surface

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Abstract

Timber is cost-effective and environmentally-friendly, which is a potential material for sustainable buildings, but its fire safety is still a significant concern. In this work, we investigate the burning behaviors of different types of woods and their self-extinction mechanism under external radiation. A unique near-limit flame is observed when the irradiation is above a critical value of about 40 kW/m2. Such a near-limit flame is weak, blue, and discrete that tends to attach to the wood residue surface, different from the normal buoyancy-controlled sooty yellow flame. If the irradiation is low (< 40 kW/m2), the yellow flame extinguishes and transits directly to smoldering at the mass flux of about 4 g/m2 s. However, above the critical irradiation level, the yellow flame transits to the blue flame that does not extinguish until the mass flux of around 1 g/m2 s, extending the flame extinction limit of timber materials. The near-limit blue flame may appear only if the char surface temperature exceeds 700°C. Two critical conditions are hypothesized for this unique blue flame, (I) in-depth pyrolysis (mainly lignin) sustained by the internal smoldering combustion, and (II) the hot surface maintained by large external radiation to extend the flammability limit. This unique blue flame may play an essential role in the transition between flaming and smoldering and help evaluate the fire risk of timber materials under real fire scenarios.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development Plan under Grant no. 2020YFC1522800, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51876183, 51806230), and the SKLFS Open Fund (No. HZ2019-KF02).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Centre for Fire Safety Engineering, Department of Building Services Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Shaorun Lin & Xinyan Huang

  2. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen, China

    Shaorun Lin

  3. Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China

    Jian Gao

  4. State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Jie Ji

Authors
  1. Shaorun Lin
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  2. Xinyan Huang
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  4. Jie Ji
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Correspondence to Xinyan Huang or Jian Gao.

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Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Video S1 Ignition & burning of wood C (30 kW) (MP4 6474 kb)

Video S2. Ignition & burning of wood C (60 kW) (MP4 13756 kb)

Video S3. Irradiation on the near-limit blue flame. (MP4 7952 kb)

Appendix

Appendix

The wood and PMMA sample were pulverized into powders and dried at 70°C for 48 h. The thermal analysis was conducted with a PerkinElmer STA 6000 Simultaneous Thermal Analyzer. The initial mass was about 3 mg, and samples were heated at the constant rates of 30 K/min. Two oxygen concentrations were selected, 0% (nitrogen) and 21% (air), with a flow rate of 50 mL/min. Experiments were repeated twice for each case, and good repeatability is shown. As compared in Fig. 9, the decomposition both started at more than 200°C, while the DTG curve of wood is much wider than that of PMMA. Clearly, the reaction of PMMA already finished right below 500°C. For the DTG curve of wood, the decomposition of wood (especialy the lignin component) can still exist above 600°C. Figures 10, 11, 12 show the evolutions of mass flux, heat release rate and surface temperature of wood C under different external radiations.

Figure 9
figure 9

TGA results of (a) wood C and (b) PMMA under air and nitrogen flow at a heating rate of 30 K/min

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Figure 10
figure 10

Evolution of mass flux of Wood C under the external radiation (\({\dot{{q}}}_{e}^{{\prime \prime}}\)) of (a) 30 kW/m2, (b) 40 kW/m2, (c) 50 kW/m2, and (d) 60 kW/m2

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Figure 11
figure 11

Evolution of heat release rate of Wood C under the external radiation (\({\dot{{q}}}_{e}^{{\prime \prime}}\)) of (a) 30 kW/m2, (b) 40 kW/m2, (c) 50 kW/m2, and (d) 60 kW/m2

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Figure 12
figure 12

Time evolution of the top surface temperature under external heat flux from 20 to 60 kW/m2

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Figure 13 shows the mass flux and temperature evolution of PMMA under the external radiant heat flux of 60 kW/m2. The mass flux evolution of PMMA is different from that of wood in Fig. 5. For PMMA, the mass flux approximately sustained at 20 g/m2 s during burning, and the extinction occurred due to the burnout of fuel. In Fig. 13b, during the flaming combustion, the top surface temperature was measured to be constant at about 400°C before the burnout. The value is also close to final temperature of DTG in Fig. 9b.

Figure 13
figure 13

The mass flux evolution and surface temperature of PMMA under the external radiation of 60 kW/m2

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Lin, S., Huang, X., Gao, J. et al. Extinction of Wood Fire: A Near-Limit Blue Flame Above Hot Smoldering Surface. Fire Technol 58, 415–434 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-021-01146-6

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