Flickering candle flames and their collective behavior

Synchronization modes of triple flickering buoyant diffusion flames: Experimental identification and model interpretation

The synchronization modes of a nonlinear oscillator system consisting of three identical flickering buoyant diffusion flames in isosceles triangles were studied experimentally and theoretically. Five synchronization modes, such as the in-phase, flickering death, partially flickering death, partially in-phase, and rotation modes, were experimentally observed and identified by systematically adjusting the flame distance and fuel flow rates. Two toy models were adopted to interpret the experimentally identified dynamical modes: one is the classical Kuramoto model, and the other is a complexified Stuart-Landau model, which was proposed through the introduction of the complex coupling term. The theoretical results show that the Kuramoto model successfully interpreted the dynamical modes except for those associated with amplitude death, and the complexified Stuart-Landau model well interpreted all the dynamical modes identified in our experiment. Remarkably, the proposed complexified Stuart-Landau model breaks a new path in the investigation of globally coupled nonlinear dynamical systems with identical oscillators, especially for the study of amplitude death mode.

Bifurcation structure of the flame oscillation

A flame exhibits a limit-cycle oscillation, which is called "flame flickering" or "puffing," in a certain condition. We investigated the bifurcation structure of the flame oscillation in both simulation and experiment. We performed a two-dimensional hydrodynamic simulation by employing the flame sheet model. We reproduced the flame oscillation and investigated the parameter dependencies of the amplitude and frequency on the fuel-inlet diameter. We also constructed an experimental system, in which we could finely vary the fuel-inlet diameter, and we investigated the diameter-dependencies of the amplitude and frequency. In our simulation, we observed the hysteresis and bistability of the stationary and oscillatory states. In our experiments, we observed the switching between the stationary and oscillatory states. As fluctuations can induce the switching in the bistable system, switching observed in our experiments suggested the bistability of the two states. Therefore, we concluded that the oscillatory state appeared from the stationary state through the subcritical Andronov-Hopf bifurcation in both the simulation and experiment. The amplitude was increased and the frequency was decreased as the fuel-inlet diameter was increased. In addition, we visualized the vortex structure in our simulation and discussed the effect of the vortex on the flame dynamics.