I am putting together an oil refinery and would like to model the flame that shoots out of a flare stack. Any suggestions on how to model this?
Thanks In Advance
Ira
Yeah. You should blow air up the stack. At the top of the stack, place “flame shaped” bits of colored celluloid. Place a light bulb under the strips. Make darn sure the light bulb can’t start a fire.
The air will cause the strips to flutter.
You might also replace the bulb with several LED’s that are flashed randomly.
Ed
I would try one of the inexpensive flickering tea lamps. Diassemble the lamp from the base, wire it into the flare stack, maybe add some transparent orange paint and fire it up. We are assuming full combustion so your flare should not be belching black smoke.
Easy peasy. Use a real flame. One guy did this and it was featured in a 2000’s some odd MRR magazine. Which one, I cannot remember.
I model in N scle, so the flame would have be really small.
Ira
I suppose you MIGHT be able to use a real flame, if you designed it just right.
No mistakes, though. Imagine what your insurance agent would say when he found out that it had just burned down your house: “We won’t pay out on THAT claim.”
Ed
oh well…
I have heard of modelers using one of the ultrasonic water atomizer diffusers as a “smoke unit” in a chimney. Perhaps one of these and a blue LED in or near the stack would work for you?
I don’t know what’s inside one of these new-fangled “vape” things but something like that might work. I’m no fan of stinky smoke fluid but the water atomizers may hold promise, especially if driven by a tiny blower.
Just a possibility, Good Luck, Ed
I use flickering LEDs for my fireplaces and boilers. The ones I buy are 3mm and if they’re too big for N gauge use fiber optics. I buy .5mm. ,75mm, 1mm & 2mm fiber optical cable to remote my LEDs if I need them smaller. I use orange and yellow together for fireplaces. The random ywo color flicker looks like the real thing.
Use heat on the end of the fiber optics to make a blob that looks like a flame.
Mel
My Model Railroad
http://melvineperry.blogspot.com/
I always thought there was additional circuitry for flickering led’s I thought there was a recent MRVP on the fire in the log blog boiler, but I am not finding it.
What color led or colors do you use to simulate fire?
I have some red and clear 1.5 volt micro bulbs. I was thinking of some orange paint on the bulb and run it to a flicking unit under the layout. Some cotton sprayed black around the top of the stack might work as well.
Henry
I bought two 100 packs of 3mm flickering orange and yellow. I pair them up with separate resistors and run them off my 8½ volt structure power supply. They randomly flicker so the equivalent ends up looking like a real fire slightly changing from orange to yellow.
I have several fireplaces with the dual LEDs and powered from my Arduino Random Lighting Controllers. I have a toggle that parallels the Arduino so that I can keep them on if I’m showing off my lighting.
The LEDs flicker on their own, no special circuitry needed.
Mel
RR Mel:
Where did you get the flickering Led’s? I need just one orange one and it would work great. How many ohm resistor resistor did you use?
I have 276 parts drawers and I ran out of storage space, because the flickering LEDs are not on my list of frequently used goodies I stored them else were and I have looked for them all morning without success.
I will continue looking for them and you are welcome to have a dozen or so if I can locate them. I have 14 two section parts drawers dedicated to LEDs and didn’t make room for the flickering LEDs.
Some look empty but they’re not.
I bought a 100 pack each of orange and yellow off eBay about 2 or 3 years ago. I was in a flame mode back then and I built up a couple dozen fireplaces, camp fires and a forge in my roundhouse, haven’t used any since.
I remember growing up in EL Paso where there were 4 refineries with flam
My club used cotton as the smoke from a smokestack, you could use that some LEDs and a small fan to get the cotton to flicker and such.
Another method would be to carve a flame from a round plastic or wooden dowel and paint it red, orange and yellow. Yellow being where the flame is the hottest.
RR Mel:
Thanks, I am looking forward to hearing from you. What size resistor is needed for the LED’s?
Ira
Still looking. As best as I can remember I used a 1KΩ ¼ watt resistors on both LEDs from my 8½ volt supply. They were quite bright but I used them as indirect lighting not straight on.
I painted the interior of the fireplaces with Aluminum Crafters paint and positioned the LEDs to flood the fireplace with light from the bottom. The effect is rather good, the interior room flickers like the real thing with the room light off. With the room light on you can still see the fire in the fireplace through the windows.
Mel
My Model Railroad
http://melvineperry.blogs
I’d put some blue or purple at the very base, just a little. Just to get the effect.
The blue on the flames on the four refineries in El Paso was very hard to see, even less as the flame got larger and brighter.
Mel
My Model Railroad
http://melvineperry.blogspot.com/
Bakersfield, California
I’m beginning to realize that aging is not for wimps.