Fire whirls could be useful for cleaning up oil spills

New York Times : Fire whirls are tornado-like phenomena that often occur during large fires. They can be extremely damaging because the vortex causes the fire to burn much hotter. Inspired by a video of a fire whirl that ignited on a spill of bourbon in a pond at the Jim Beam distillery in Kentucky, Huahua Xiao, Michael Gollner, and Elaine Oran of the University of Maryland, College Park, have found that the whirls could possibly help in cleaning up oil spills. They poured n-heptane, an ingredient in some fuels, into a pan of water, ignited it, and then channeled air toward the fire to create a vortex. The resulting fire whirl soon changed from a yellow flame to a blue flame, indicating that burning was occurring at a significantly higher temperature and more efficiently, thereby producing less soot. A subsequent test using crude oil had similar results. The blue fire whirl is, as far as the researchers have found, a previously undocumented phenomenon. The Maryland team hopes to test the phenomenon at a larger scale to determine whether it could be useful for oil-spill cleanup.