Experimental study on behaviors of flame spread over aviation kerosene under forced airflow

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In realistic industrial scenarios, the leakage of aviation kerosene (RP-5) under forced airflow easily leads to fire spread, which seriously threatens the safety of human life and causes enormous economic losses. Therefore, it is necessary to study the characteristic parameters of flame spread over RP-5 aviation kerosene under forced airflow, such as flame tilt angle (θ), flame height (H), and flame spread rate (V). In this paper, the RP-5 flame spread experiments were carried out by varying the speed (u = 0–6 m/s) and direction (concurrent, opposed, and perpendicular airflows) of the forced airflow. The results show that the flame tilt angle increases as the airflow speed increases and finally tends to be stable, while the flame height decreases monotonically with airflow speed. The special behaviors of flame bifurcation and fire spread rate induced by the critical airflow speed are observed. The phenomenon of "flame bifurcation" will occur due to the influence of differential pressure resistance under high concurrent airflow conditions (u > 1 m/s). When the airflow is relatively small (u ≤ 1 m/s), the mean flame spread rate varies slightly with increasing airflow speed. With further increasing the airflow speed (u > 1 m/s), the mean flame spread rate increases with an increase in the concurrent airflow speed while decreasing as the opposed airflow speed increases. By contrast, the mean flame spread rate remains essentially unchanged under all perpendicular airflows.