Chemical Species and Temperature Mapping in Full Scale Underventilated Compartment Fires

Published

July 5, 2010

Author(s)

Andrew J. Lock, Matthew F. Bundy, Erik L. Johnsson, Kelly M. Opert, Anthony P. Hamins, Cheolhong Hwang, Ki Y. Lee

Abstract

Many injuries and deaths throughout the world are caused by fires each year. Many of the deaths are the result of toxic gas inhalation, such as carbon monoxide, by a victim remote from the actual fire source. In order to facilitate better building standards, forensic reconstruction, and safety design, fire models are used to predict or reconstruct the fire incident. Fire models such as the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) can predict heat transfer and gas flow through a known structural environment with relatively low uncertainty, however they utilize a very simple mixture fraction based chemistry model. This simplification is highly effective in making the code accessible and efficient enough to be used on a standard personal computer, but limits the model s effectiveness at predicting intermediate and incomplete products of combustion, such as carbon monoxide and soot, that may be generated by a real fire, especially if that fire is oxygen deficient and becomes underventilated. Recently NIST has undertaken an extensive set of measurements of the thermal and chemical environment of underventilated fires in an ISO9705 compartment to support fire model development and validation. A robust ISO9705 compartment was constructed to allow for repeated long duration underventilated compartment fire tests with repeatable boundary conditions and minimum turnaround time. The tests were conducted in the NIST Large Fire Lab (LFL), which provides a unique facility for this type of fire experiment. Temperature resistant and water cooled probes were implemented to extract gas samples for analysis, and a sturdy superstructure was constructed to facilitate positioning hardware so that the sample probes could be repositioned within the room during a test. Measurements of fuel mass loss rate and/or precise metering of fuel delivery rates were made to provide accurate data on the combustion efficiency of the system.

Proceedings Title

12th International Conference on Fire Science and Engineering

Conference Dates

July 5-7, 2010

Conference Location

Nottingham

Conference Title

Interflam 2010

Pub Type

Conferences

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Keywords

compartment fires, underventilated, three dimensional mapping, upper layer, fuel distribution

Citation

Lock, A. , Bundy, M. , Johnsson, E. , Opert, K. , Hamins, A. , Hwang, C. and Lee, K. (2010), Chemical Species and Temperature Mapping in Full Scale Underventilated Compartment Fires, 12th International Conference on Fire Science and Engineering, Nottingham, -1, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=905754 (Accessed October 14, 2025)