Mesmerizing 'blue whirl' from fire tornado could be cleaner solution for oil spills

A mesmerizingpure blue flame that spins like a top could be the clean burn needed to mop up oil spills in oceans, lakesand rivers.

The "blue whirl" was accidentally discovered by a team of American scientists while they weresimulating a controlled fire whirlorfire tornado a violent and destructive weather eventthat can formduringwildfires, such as one recently blamed in the death of an Alberta pilot.

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ElaineOran, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, saidshe and her colleagues decided to light their lab on fire after watching some"fabulous" footage of a fire whirlon YouTube.

The video featured the inferno forming over a lake in Kentucky next to a Jim Beam factory.

You know where this is going.

Somehow a vat of bourbon from the factory had spilled and seeped into the lake.Ignited by a lightning strike, the fire tornado grew, "swirling around, getting bigger and bringing all of the alcohol towards it," said Oran.

It was sucking the Jim Beam off the surface of the water and burning it up.

"And almost simultaneously, we said 'remediation.'"

The experiment

That promptedOran and her colleagues to furtherstudy howfire whirlsburn over water laced with fuel.

When they recreated the phenomenon in the lab, Oran says the fire whirleruptedinto an angry column of yellow flames.

But then ittransitioned intowhat shedescribed as a small and stable"beautiful blue flame" the blue whirl.

Oil and fire

Controlled burns are already used as aremediation tool foroil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. Problem is,they produce black, polluting plumes of smoke.

Oran said that's a sign that thefire does not haveenough oxygen to burn the fuel completely.However,when afire whirl transformsfrom yellow to blue, it becomes a "cleaner burning" hydrocarbon flame.

"More of the soot was burned up," she said. "So we thought it would be interesting to quantify how good, or how much better, fire whirls might be than just a regular fire for cleaning up oil or other things on the surface."

The team's results have been published in the the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Harnessing the blue whirl

"I think it could be done, I really do," Oran told CBC's Calgary Eyeopener on Monday.

But first, she and her colleagues must figure out what conditions are needed to create a blue whirl, and whether it can be replicated with various types of fuel.

Also, they have to understand how to control it.

"It would be very nice to recreate one of these little blue whirls without having to go through the fire whirl stage which is so dangerous."

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