The project was inspired by the the explosion effects of modern attack munitions (see GBU and JDAMs). Everything was built in 3ds Max, rendered with Vray & and composited in After Effects. The main fire simulation that took over 15 hours of work and 3 Gigabytes of hard drive space.
First initial render pass.
Results after 8 render passes with missing frame replaced and an extension of the burn up to extra 5 seconds.
Example of a finished simulation in a screen