- Author
-
Heskestad, G.
- Title
- Fire Products Collector for Calorimetry Into the MW Range. Technical Report.
- Coporate
- Factory Mutual Research Corp., Norwood, MA
- Report
-
Technical Report; FMRC J.I. 0C2E1.RA
June 1981
109 p.
- Keywords
-
calorimetry
|
cone calorimeters
|
heat loss
|
water application
- Abstract
- A Fire Products Collector capable of accommodating fires several MW in size has been constructed. The collector gathers fire gases from a test fire below an inlet cone and then conditions the flow to one of uniform velocity, temperature and species concentration. Single-point measurements of temperature and species concentrations, together with the known flow rate, lead to the convective heat flux and species generation rates of the fire. In a performance evaluation, measurements were made of the convective heat flux and total heat-release rate (as interpreted both from the generation rate of carbon dioxide and the consumption rate of oxygen) for three differently sized methanol pools, each at three different elevations relative to the collector intake and in combination with several flow rates. It was confirmed that the source elevation and the collector flow rate did not influence the results. The average ratio of total heat-release rate (based on CO2 generation) to theoretical heat-release rate (based on mass burning rate) was 0.961 with a standard deviation of 0.029, the average being close to unity as expected for methanol. Among other fire sources investigated, this ratio (i.e., combustion efficiency) varied from a low of 0.44 for a polystyrene source to a high of 0.96 for a PMMA source. The lowest burning rate which the collector is capable of handling reasonably accurately is estimated to be about 100 kW.