"At the Opening Ceremony for the XXII Olympic Winter Games" courtesy of President of the Russian Federation, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Even causal viewers of the XXII Olympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia have seen the architecturally striking Olympic cauldron with its giant flame. While certainly, the spirit behind the Olympic tradition plays its part in keeping the flame alive, industrial technologies — vaporizer and multi-fuel burner — play a part as well.

Because natural gas is not available in the Olympic Park, the cauldron is fired with propane fuel. An LPG vaporizer system supplied by Eclipse Inc., Rockford, Ill., and Algas-SDI, Seattle, was chosen to precisely deliver the propane air mixture required to fuel the massive flame. The system includes an Algas-SDI QM-100 packaged vaporizer that is heated by an Eclipse ThermAir 200 multi-fuel burner.

The cauldron, which was lit as the apogee of the opening ceremonies, will blaze throughout the games. NBC News anchor Brian Williams called the flame, “The most powerful we have ever seen at any games. It sounds more like a Soyuz rocket blasting off. And speaking of space, the flame is indeed visible from space…from 220 miles above the Earth.”

As the denouement of the closing ceremonies, the Olympic flame in the cauldron will be extinguished.