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

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.