Because I like dragons and I can’t help myself. Don’t worry. This one won’t be nearly as long as my usual posts about dragons. If anything, it’s more to show the thought process that goes into my thought experiments.

Let’s dispense with the notion of dragonfire hotter than the surface of the sun, and with biologically-produced antimatter. Let’s pretend that dragons are made of fairly ordinary flesh. They breathe fire from their mouths (naturally), so they’re going to have to be careful not to burn their tongues off. Let’s assume they have funny saliva glands that mist their mucous membranes to stop them getting scalded off by direct contact with hot air and fire. There’s still thermal radiation to deal with.

According to NOAA (who usually talk about weather, but have, in this case, started talking about fire), exposure to thermal radiation at an intensity of 10 kilowatts per square meter will cause severe pain after 5 seconds and second-degree burns (nasty blisters) after 14 seconds. With that in mind, I want to find out how hot dragonfire can be before its thermal radiation is too much for a dragon’s mouth to handle.

Well, let’s assume a dragon’s mouth is a cylinder 1 meter long and 30 centimeters in diameter. Multiply the circumference of that cylinder by its length to get its surface area (minus the ends), and then multiply the area by 10 kilowatts per square meter to get the maximum radiant power that can reach the mucous membranes. The result: 9.425 kilowatts. Now, let’s model the jet of fire as a cylinder (again, without ends) 1 centimeter in diameter and 1 meter long. That cylinder can’t emit more than 9.425 kilowatts as radiant heat. Divide 9.425 kilowatts by the cylinder’s surface area. To stay below 9.425 kilowatts, the jet of flame can’t emit at an intensity higher than 300 kilowatts per square meter. Apply the Stefan-Boltzmann law in reverse to get an estimate of what temperature gas radiates at 300 kilowatts per square meter. That comes out to a disappointing 1,517 Kelvin, which is cooler than the average wood fire.

I’m not satisfied with that, so I’m going to cheat. Sort of. I’m going to assume that the dragon has a bone in its fire-spewing orifice that acts like a supersonic rocket nozzle, which allows it to emit a very narrow, fast-moving stream of burning gas. The upshot of this is that the jet becomes narrower than that of a pressure washer: 1 mm in diameter throughout its transit through the mouth. That’s a bit more encouraging: 2,697 Kelvin, about the temperature of a hydrogen-air flame (which means we can just use hydrogen as the fuel). It’s still nowhere as hot as I want it to be, but I don’t think Sir Knight is going to be walking away from this one.

We could, of course, push the temperature up by taking into account the fact that the dragon’s mouth isn’t a perfect blackbody, and reflects some of the radiation, but like I said, this isn’t a full post. I just wanted to show you guys how I flesh out an idea.

Stay safe out there. And don’t try to breathe fire.