Fire sims model combustion chemistry, radiative heat and particle-based flame/smoke rendering — from a falling-sand chemistry toy to full rocket-engine and forest-fire spread models.
Real combustion is a chain reaction: fuel plus oxidiser above an ignition temperature releases heat faster than it escapes, so the reaction accelerates until something runs out. The sims here reproduce that feedback loop numerically — flame-front propagation in forest-fire, Sedov-Taylor blast scaling in blast-wave-overpressure, de Laval nozzle thrust in rocket-engine, and pyroclastic density currents in pyroclastic-flow.
They live across several physics categories (fire-combustion, explosions, volcanology, engineering) — this page pulls them all into one place by theme, without changing their canonical category.
No. Everything runs entirely in your browser — no downloads, plugins or accounts. Works in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari; most simulations also work on mobile.
No — an element (like fire or water) is a cross-cutting theme. A sim keeps its normal category (e.g. fluid-dynamics, geology) and can also appear on one or more element pages.
Yes — all content is free for educational use under CC BY 4.0. Link to any simulation directly or embed it in your LMS with an iframe.
Hot combustion gases are less dense than the surrounding air, so buoyancy pulls them up — the same reason smoke rises. Turbulence in that rising plume is what makes a flame flicker rather than burn as a smooth cone; sims like fire-smoke model it as a cellular automaton, others as a full fluid solver.
All three release chemical or thermal energy fast, but at very different rates and scales: combustion (combustion, forest-fire) is a self-sustaining chain reaction over seconds to hours, an explosion (blast-wave-overpressure) releases energy almost instantly as a shockwave, and volcanology (pyroclastic-flow, volcanic-eruption) moves molten rock and gas over minutes to days.