Physical modeling of fire whirls

Byram and Martin [97] used external vertical cylinders with tangential slots oriented to produce rotating flow about a fire source. They examined two sets of equipment of diameters and heights, 33 and 183 cm, or 66 and 335 cm, respectively. Burning alcohol pools within their apparatus, they reported visible fire whirls up to 300 cm tall with inner fire tube columns 2 cm in diameter. They observed horizontal velocities at the surface of the inner column of about 9 m/sec ( 6000 rpm) and vertical velocities to 18 m/sec. 

Other investigators have reproduced fire tornadoes as they develop in simulated outdoor environments. Lee and Otto [364] examined how city fires might develop by simulating in a wind tunnel a simple urban street arrangement. Their results revealed that strong street level vortices could develop due to building fire interaction. Emori and 

Saito [170] simulated a fire whirl formed during a forest fire burning over a mountain ridge top that injured several Japanese fire fighters. Soma and Saito [586] recreated fire tornadoes that occurred during the Kanto earthquake in Tokyo (1923), the Hamburg firestorms during WWII (1943), and oil-tanker fires in Hokkaido bay, Japan (1965). 

---