Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. (2022) 231: 179-184
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00414-4

Regular Article

Ethanol lamp: a simple, tunable flame oscillator and its coupled dynamics

¹ Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, 400 076, Mumbai, India
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, 400 076, Mumbai, India
³ Facultad de Ciencias en Física y Matemáticas, Universidad Autónoma de Chiapas, 29050, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, Mexico
⁴ Departamento de Ciencias, Sección Física, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Av. Universitaria 1801, San Miguel, 32, Lima, Peru
⁵ The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and The Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, Georgia Institute of Technology, 30332, Atlanta, GA, USA

^f punit@phy.iitb.ac.in

Received: 7 July 2021
Accepted: 16 December 2021
Published online: 29 December 2021

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a simple controllable experimental system that can exhibit rich dynamics. The setup comprises a sealed glass vial of ethanol with wicks immersed in it. The flame produced by such a lamp can show both steady combustion or oscillatory combustion (i.e. flickering) depending on the volume of fuel within and the number of wicks used in its construction. This tunability makes it a great model system to study the dynamics of flame oscillations and to explore emergent behaviour of coupled nonlinear oscillators in table-top experiments. In the present work, the behaviour of this system for different fuel volumes is explored and some typical phenomena reported in other experimental systems, viz. in-phase synchronization, anti-phase synchronization and amplitude death are demonstrated.