Word: ying
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...past year, a Harvard graduate student has been experimenting with fire whirls in order to learn how to predict their occurrence and properties. This study, which is being done by Shuh-Jing Ying 4G, working under Howard W. Emmons, Gordon McKay Professor of Mechanical Engineering, is the first large scale research on fire whirls. Eventually such research may help fire fighters to eliminate the threat of fire storms and other natural vortexes, like tornadoes and hurricanes...
...Ying's apparatus, located in the New Engineering Sciences Laboratory on Oxford Street, consists simply of a platform surrounded by a wire window screen ten feet high, eight feet in diameter. Ying is the first to use a rotating screen, which gives a symmetrical distribution to the air currents. He places one or more cans of acetone in the center of the platform and ignites the fuel. When the screen revolves slowly, the draft whips the acetone fires into a whirl up to 18 feet high--only two feet lower than the ceiling of the building. (The scale attained...
...only a slight draft to start a natural vortex. The vortex then increases the wind speed, which, in turn, enlarges the whirl. In the laboratory the vortex increases the velocity of the air in propotion to the screen's radius. With a screen speed of four rotations per second, Ying has produced winds up to seven miles per hour near the whirl. While the rotating screen sucks air outwards, the rising heat of the fire pulls air toward the flame; at speeds faster than four revolutions per second, the screen's pull is greater than that of the fire...
...December Ying perfected a method of determining the temperature distribution of vortexes. Since the flame wiggles, a simple thermometer was of no use, so Ying and Emmons swung a long tungsten live wire through the flame. In this way they obtained data which could be plugged into a computer program to give the temperature distribution. Ying discovered the highest temperature, 3200 degrees Farenheit, several inches from the center of the whirl...
...project has cost about $30,000, which has been paid by the National Science Foundation and the University. In January the NSF granted an additional $30,000 to allow Ying and other graduate students two more years' work on this and another project. But, according to Emmons, the present research is still a long way from yielding practical data...