Fire

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For other uses, see Fire (disambiguation).

A burning candle

Fire is the rapid

exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products.[1][a]
At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition point, flames are produced. The flame is the visible portion of the fire. Flames consist primarily of carbon dioxide, water vapor, oxygen and nitrogen. If hot enough, the gases may become ionized to produce plasma.[2] Depending on the substances alight, and any impurities outside, the color of the flame and the fire's intensity will be different.[3]

Fire, in its most common form, has the potential to result in

burning
. Fire is a significant process that influences ecological systems worldwide. The positive effects of fire include stimulating growth and maintaining various ecological systems. Its negative effects include hazard to life and property, atmospheric pollution, and water contamination.[4] When fire removes protective vegetation, heavy rainfall can contribute to increased soil erosion by water.[5] Additionally, the burning of vegetation releases nitrogen into the atmosphere, unlike elements such as potassium and phosphorus which remain in the ash and are quickly recycled into the soil.[6][7] This loss of nitrogen caused by a fire produces a long-term reduction in the fertility of the soil, which can be recovered as atmospheric nitrogen is fixed and converted to ammonia by natural phenomena such as lightning or by leguminous plants such as clover, peas, and green beans.

Fire is one of the four classical elements and has been used by humans in rituals, in agriculture for clearing land, for cooking, generating heat and light, for signaling, propulsion purposes, smelting, forging, incineration of waste, cremation, and as a weapon or mode of destruction.

Etymology

The word "fire" originated from

Old English Fyr 'Fire, a fire', which can be traced back to the Germanic root *fūr-, which itself comes from the Proto-Indo-European *perjos from the root *paewr- 'fire'. The current spelling of "fire" has been in use since as early as 1200, but it was not until around 1600 that it completely replaced the Middle English term fier (which is still preserved in the word "fiery").[8]

History

Fossil record

Main article: Fossil record of fire

The fossil record of fire first appears with the establishment of a land-based flora in the

Late Devonian, charcoal is present ever since.[12] The level of atmospheric oxygen is closely related to the prevalence of charcoal: clearly oxygen is the key factor in the abundance of wildfire.[13] Fire also became more abundant when grasses radiated and became the dominant component of many ecosystems, around 6 to 7 million years ago;[14] this kindling provided tinder which allowed for the more rapid spread of fire.[13] These widespread fires may have initiated a positive feedback process, whereby they produced a warmer, drier climate more conducive to fire.[13]

Human control of fire

Early human control

Main article: Control of fire by early humans
Bushman starting a fire in Namibia

The ability to control fire was a dramatic change in the habits of early humans.

Making fire to generate heat and light made it possible for people to cook food, simultaneously increasing the variety and availability of nutrients and reducing disease by killing pathogenic microorganisms in the food.[16] The heat produced would also help people stay warm in cold weather, enabling them to live in cooler climates. Fire also kept nocturnal predators at bay. Evidence of occasional cooked food is found from 1 million years ago.[17] Although this evidence shows that fire may have been used in a controlled fashion about 1 million years ago,[18][19] other sources put the date of regular use at 400,000 years ago.[20] Evidence becomes widespread around 50 to 100 thousand years ago, suggesting regular use from this time; interestingly, resistance to air pollution started to evolve in human populations at a similar point in time.[20] The use of fire became progressively more sophisticated, as it was used to create charcoal and to control wildlife from tens of thousands of years ago.[20]

Fire has also been used for centuries as a method of torture and execution, as evidenced by death by burning as well as torture devices such as the iron boot, which could be filled with water, oil, or even lead and then heated over an open fire to the agony of the wearer.

cauldron above fire in South Africa
.

By the Neolithic Revolution, during the introduction of grain-based agriculture, people all over the world used fire as a tool in landscape management. These fires were typically controlled burns or "cool fires", as opposed to uncontrolled "hot fires", which damage the soil. Hot fires destroy plants and animals, and endanger communities.[21] This is especially a problem in the forests of today where traditional burning is prevented in order to encourage the growth of timber crops. Cool fires are generally conducted in the spring and autumn. They clear undergrowth, burning up biomass that could trigger a hot fire should it get too dense. They provide a greater variety of environments, which encourages game and plant diversity. For humans, they make dense, impassable forests traversable. Another human use for fire in regards to landscape management is its use to clear land for agriculture. Slash-and-burn agriculture is still common across much of tropical Africa, Asia and South America. For small farmers, controlled fires are a convenient way to clear overgrown areas and release nutrients from standing vegetation back into the soil.[22] However, this useful strategy is also problematic. Growing population, fragmentation of forests and warming climate are making the earth's surface more prone to ever-larger escaped fires. These harm ecosystems and human infrastructure, cause health problems, and send up spirals of carbon and soot that may encourage even more warming of the atmosphere – and thus feed back into more fires. Globally today, as much as 5 million square kilometres – an area more than half the size of the United States – burns in a given year.[22]

Later human control

fire-bombing raids in July 1943, which killed an estimated 50,000 people[23]

There are numerous modern applications of fire. In its broadest sense, fire is used by nearly every human being on Earth in a controlled setting every day. Users of

internal combustion vehicles employ fire every time they drive. Thermal power stations provide electricity for a large percentage of humanity by igniting fuels such as coal, oil or natural gas, then using the resultant heat to boil water into steam, which then drives turbines
.

Use of fire in war

The use of fire in warfare has a long history. Fire was the basis of all early thermal weapons. The Byzantine fleet used Greek fire to attack ships and men.

The invention of gunpowder in China led to the fire lance, a flame-thrower weapon dating to around 1000 CE which was a precursor to projectile weapons driven by burning gunpowder.

The earliest modern flamethrowers were used by infantry in the First World War, first used by German troops against entrenched French troops near Verdun in February 1915.[24] They were later successfully mounted on armoured vehicles in the Second World War.

Hand-thrown

Molotov cocktails, were deployed during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Also during that war, incendiary bombs were deployed against Guernica by Fascist Italian and Nazi German air forces that had been created specifically to support Franco's Nationalists
.

Incendiary bombs were dropped by

Dresden; in the latter two cases firestorms were deliberately caused in which a ring of fire surrounding each city was drawn inward by an updraft caused by a central cluster of fires.[25] The United States Army Air Force also extensively used incendiaries against Japanese targets in the latter months of the war, devastating entire cities constructed primarily of wood and paper houses. The incendiary fluid napalm was used in July 1944, towards the end of the Second World War, although its use did not gain public attention until the Vietnam War.[26]

Fire management

Controlling a fire to optimize its size, shape, and intensity is generally called fire management, and the more advanced forms of it, as traditionally (and sometimes still) practiced by skilled cooks, blacksmiths, ironmasters, and others, are highly skilled activities. They include knowledge of which fuel to burn; how to arrange the fuel; how to stoke the fire both in early phases and in maintenance phases; how to modulate the heat, flame, and smoke as suited to the desired application; how best to bank a fire to be revived later; how to choose, design, or modify stoves, fireplaces, bakery ovens, industrial furnaces; and so on. Detailed expositions of fire management are available in various books about blacksmithing, about skilled camping or military scouting, and about domestic arts.

Productive use for energy

coal-fired power station
in China

Burning fuel converts chemical energy into heat energy; wood has been used as fuel since prehistory.[27] The International Energy Agency states that nearly 80% of the world's power has consistently come from fossil fuels such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal in the past decades.[28] The fire in a power station is used to heat water, creating steam that drives turbines. The turbines then spin an electric generator to produce electricity.[29] Fire is also used to provide mechanical work directly by thermal expansion, in both external and internal combustion engines.

The unburnable solid remains of a combustible material left after a fire is called clinker if its melting point is below the flame temperature, so that it fuses and then solidifies as it cools, and ash if its melting point is above the flame temperature.

Physical properties

Chemistry

Main article: Combustion
The balanced chemical equation for the combustion of methane, a hydrocarbon

Fire is a chemical process in which a

combustion reaction, does not proceed directly and involves intermediates.[30] Although the oxidizing agent is typically oxygen, other compounds are able to fulfill the role. For instance, chlorine trifluoride is able to ignite sand.[31]

Fires start when a

chemical
reaction during combustion, but which enables the reactants to combust more readily.

Once ignited, a chain reaction must take place whereby fires can sustain their own heat by the further release of heat energy in the process of combustion and may propagate, provided there is a continuous supply of an oxidizer and fuel.

If the oxidizer is oxygen from the surrounding air, the presence of a force of gravity, or of some similar force caused by acceleration, is necessary to produce convection, which removes combustion products and brings a supply of oxygen to the fire. Without gravity, a fire rapidly surrounds itself with its own combustion products and non-oxidizing gases from the air, which exclude oxygen and extinguish the fire. Because of this, the risk of fire in a spacecraft is small when it is coasting in inertial flight.[32][33] This does not apply if oxygen is supplied to the fire by some process other than thermal convection.

The fire tetrahedron

Fire can be extinguished by removing any one of the elements of the fire tetrahedron. Consider a natural gas flame, such as from a stove-top burner. The fire can be extinguished by any of the following:

  • turning off the gas supply, which removes the fuel source;
  • covering the flame completely, which smothers the flame as the combustion both uses the available oxidizer (the oxygen in the air) and displaces it from the area around the flame with CO2;
  • application of an inert gas such as carbon dioxide, smothering the flame by displacing the available oxidizer;
  • application of water, which removes heat from the fire faster than the fire can produce it (similarly, blowing hard on a flame will displace the heat of the currently burning gas from its fuel source, to the same end); or
  • application of a retardant chemical such as Halon (largely banned in some countries as of 2023) to the flame, which retards the chemical reaction itself until the rate of combustion is too slow to maintain the chain reaction.

In contrast, fire is intensified by increasing the overall rate of combustion. Methods to do this include balancing the input of fuel and oxidizer to stoichiometric proportions, increasing fuel and oxidizer input in this balanced mix, increasing the ambient temperature so the fire's own heat is better able to sustain combustion, or providing a catalyst, a non-reactant medium in which the fuel and oxidizer can more readily react.

Flame

Main article: Flame
See also: Flame test
A candle's flame

A flame is a mixture of reacting gases and solids emitting visible,

UDMH flames are similarly pale blue, while burning boron and its compounds, evaluated in mid-20th century as a high energy fuel for jet and rocket engines
, emits intense green flame, leading to its informal nickname of "Green Dragon".

A controlled burn in the Northwest Territories, showing variations in the flame color due to temperature. The hottest parts near the ground appear yellowish-white, while the cooler upper parts appear red.

The glow of a flame is complex.

emission spectra
.

Fire is affected by gravity. Left: Flame on Earth; Right: Flame on the ISS

The common distribution of a flame under normal gravity conditions depends on

industry, especially concerning fuel efficiency
.

Typical adiabatic temperatures

Main article: Adiabatic flame temperature

The adiabatic flame temperature of a given fuel and oxidizer pair is that at which the gases achieve stable combustion.

Fire science

Fire science is a branch of

physical science which includes fire behavior, dynamics, and combustion. Applications of fire science include fire protection, fire investigation, and wildfire
management.

Fire ecology

Main article: Fire ecology

Every natural ecosystem on land has its own fire regime, and the organisms in those ecosystems are adapted to or dependent upon that fire regime. Fire creates a mosaic of different habitat patches, each at a different stage of succession.[38] Different species of plants, animals, and microbes specialize in exploiting a particular stage, and by creating these different types of patches, fire allows a greater number of species to exist within a landscape.

Prevention and protection systems

Main articles: Wildfire and Fire protection
An abandoned convent on fire in Quebec

Wildfire prevention programs around the world may employ techniques such as wildland fire use and prescribed or controlled burns.[39][40] Wildland fire use refers to any fire of natural causes that is monitored but allowed to burn. Controlled burns are fires ignited by government agencies under less dangerous weather conditions.[41]

water mains and fire hydrants
or they might use A and B class foam depending on what is feeding the fire.

Fire prevention is intended to reduce sources of ignition. Fire prevention also includes education to teach people how to avoid causing fires.[42] Buildings, especially schools and tall buildings, often conduct fire drills to inform and prepare citizens on how to react to a building fire. Purposely starting destructive fires constitutes arson and is a crime in most jurisdictions.[43]

Model

plastics
used in vehicles and vessels are also tested.

Where fire prevention and fire protection have failed to prevent damage,

fire insurance can mitigate the financial impact.[44]

See also

References

Notes

  1. rusting or digestion
    are not included by this definition.

Citations

  1. ^ Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology (PDF). National Wildfire Coordinating Group. October 2007. p. 70. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-08-21. Retrieved 2008-12-18.
  2. ^ Helmenstine, Anne Marie. "What is the State of Matter of Fire or Flame? Is it a Liquid, Solid, or Gas?". About.com. Archived from the original on 24 January 2009. Retrieved 2009-01-21.
  3. ^ Helmenstine, Anne Marie. "What is the State of Matter of Fire or Flame? Is it a Liquid, Solid, or Gas?". About.com. Archived from the original on 2009-01-24. Retrieved 2009-01-21.
  4. ^ Lentile, et al., 319
  5. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1987.tb00156.x
    .
  6. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2023-11-02.
  7. ^ "How Do Wildfires Affect Soil? - Applied Earth Sciences". 2019-11-12. Retrieved 2023-11-02.
  8. ^ "Fire". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 2023-03-24.
  9. PMID 10905606
    .
  10. doi:10.1016/0031-0182(91)90180-Y
    .
  11. doi:10.1130/G20363.1
    .
  12. ^
    PMID 16832054
    .
  13. ^
    S2CID 22389421
    .
  14. JSTOR 3515337
    .
  15. PMID 27216521
    .
  16. S2CID 163033909
    .
  17. S2CID 177595396. Archived
    from the original on 1 October 2019. Retrieved 25 August 2020.
  18. ^ O'Carroll, Eoin (5 April 2012). "Were Early Humans Cooking Their Food a Million Years Ago?". ABC News. Archived from the original on 4 February 2020. Retrieved 10 January 2020. Early humans harnessed fire as early as a million years ago, much earlier than previously thought, suggests evidence unearthed in a cave in South Africa.
  19. PMID 22474385
    .
  20. ^
    S2CID 22389421
    .
  21. ISBN 0-231-10632-7
    .
  22. ^ a b Krajick, Kevin (16 November 2011). "Farmers, Flames and Climate: Are We Entering an Age of 'Mega-Fires'? – State of the Planet". Columbia Climate School. Archived from the original on 2012-05-26. Retrieved 2012-05-23.
  23. ^ "In Pictures: German destruction Archived 2019-12-13 at the Wayback Machine". BBC News.
  24. ^ "Flamethrower in action". nzhistory.govt.nz. Retrieved 2023-11-02.
  25. ISBN 978-1-4129-6120-2
    . Retrieved 2 September 2022.
  26. ^ Guillaume, Marine (2016-12-01). "Napalm in US Bombing Doctrine and Practice, 1942-1975" (PDF). The Asia-Pacific Journal. 14 (23).
  27. ISBN 978-0-87371-978-0
    .
  28. ^ (October 2022), "World Energy Outlook 2022", IEA.
  29. ^ "How electricity is generated". U.S. Energy Information Administration. Retrieved 2023-11-02.
  30. ^ a b "What is fire?". New Scientist. Retrieved November 5, 2022.
  31. ^ Lowe, Derek (February 26, 2008). "Sand Won't Save You This Time". Science. Retrieved November 5, 2022.
  32. ^ NASA Johnson (29 August 2008). "Ask Astronaut Greg Chamitoff: Light a Match!". Archived from the original on 2021-12-11. Retrieved 30 December 2016 – via YouTube.
  33. ^ Inglis-Arkell, Esther (8 March 2011). "How does fire behave in zero gravity?". Archived from the original on 13 November 2015. Retrieved 30 December 2016.
  34. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
    , 2000.
  35. ^ CFM-1 experiment results Archived 2007-09-12 at the Wayback Machine, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, April 2005.
  36. ^ LSP-1 experiment results Archived 2007-03-12 at the Wayback Machine, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, April 2005.
  37. ^ "Flame temperatures". www.derose.net. Archived from the original on 2014-04-17. Retrieved 2007-07-09.
  38. Ecology: individuals, populations, and communities
    , Third Edition. Blackwell Science Ltd., Cambridge, Massachusetts, US
  39. ^ Federal Fire and Aviation Operations Action Plan, 4.
  40. ^ "UK: The Role of Fire in the Ecology of Heathland in Southern Britain". International Forest Fire News. 18: 80–81. January 1998. Archived from the original on 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2011-09-03.
  41. ^ "Prescribed Fires". SmokeyBear.com. Archived from the original on 2008-10-20. Retrieved 2008-11-21.
  42. ^ Fire & Life Safety Education, Manitoba Office of the Fire Commissioner Archived December 6, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  43. ISBN 9780763722470. Archived
    from the original on February 16, 2022. Retrieved March 16, 2019.
  44. ISBN 9789401805414. Archived
    from the original on 2021-04-11. Retrieved 2020-10-25.

Sources

Further reading

External links

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