Talk:Flame arrester
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Effect of radiant ignition beyond the barrier?
[edit]This article needs more work on explaining the theory and principle of operation. I am not a scientist or engineer, so I don't know these details.
It appears that a flame front is sustained and propagated by:
- close proximity of a fuel source and oxidizer to the flame front
- radiant heat emission from chemical reactions occurring in the flame front
A flame arrester may function primarily as a heat absorbing wick, absorbing the radiant energy from the flame front that is chemically decomposing in mid-air. By wicking away the radiant energy, the remaining radiant energy is not sufficient to trigger self-ignition of the fuel source beyond the screen.
An explosive flame front tends to burn only a thin layer of the combustible mixture, and once the flame front passes, the flame is not sustained because all the fuel has been consumed. It seems likely that the arrester just needs to be capable of withstanding that sudden burst of radiant emission to stop the spread of the fire. The mesh can probably be considered to be like a shade for infrared radiation, stopping it from shining through into the flammable mixture on the other side.
Stopping flame spread isn't some magical property of small holed meshes. If the wire mesh were itself directly heated from some non-flame heat source to the self-ignition temperature of the fuel surrounding the mesh, it would serve to ignite the fuel itself due to radiating its own heat into the fuel.
Probably a series of stacked tubes would work, and also closely space metal sheets. It would be interesting to see how small of a tube diameter or sheet spacing is necessary for a flame front to not be able to continue burning within the diameter or width of the tubes/sheets, using combustible fuels of various types.