Burning Behavior Analysis in Meso and Large-Scale Oil Slick Fires With and Without Waves Using Outdoor Gas Emission Sampling (OGES) System

A new Outdoor Gas Emission Sampling (OGES) system was developed to serve as a low-cost alternative to expensive industrial gas sampling equipment. This research showed its effectiveness in sampling a smoke plume from multiple points simultaneously, obtaining gas concentration curves for common products of combustion such as CO₂ and CO in meso-scale experiments. The optimal height for combustion product sampling was determined based on a variety of factors, most notably CO/CO₂ ratio, which showed to be most consistent when located in the intermittent and plume regime of the McCaffrey plume. Large-scale field tests at U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) demonstrated the potential of using OGES to evaluate the completeness of combustion for various fuels in a variety of settings. Oxygen Consumption (OC) and Carbon Dioxide Generation (CDG) methods in combination with plume theory results show the potential of using point sampling within a smoke plume to estimate HRR for fires that exceed the capabilities of conventional hood-based calorimeters.