- Author
-
Aggarwal, S.
- Title
- Study of Smoke Generated by Smoldering Fires for Fuel Identification.
- Coporate
- Worcester Polytechnic Inst., MA
- Report
-
Thesis,
December 1994,
182 p.
- Keywords
-
smoldering
|
fuels
|
smoke
|
smoke detectors
|
instruments
|
data analysis
|
experiments
|
light scattering detectors
|
ionization detectors
|
light extinction
- Identifiers
- Measuring Ionization Chamber (MIC); Mie scattering theory
- Abstract
- In this work an attempt has been made to characterize the smoke for fuel identification using the signals from light-scattering, ionization, and light-extinction reference smoke detection instruments. Smoke properties and fuel mass loss of various fuels heated on a hot plate were measured in an enclosure. The measured smoke properties are scattered light intensity, response of Measuring Ionization Chamber (MIC), obscuration, and smoke particle density. Data was collected for conventional fuels: wood, paper, particle board, nylon, wool, polyurethane foam, and PMMA and also for nonconventional fuels: cooking oil and bread. The experiments were restricted to the non-flaming burning regime. The responses of the reference ionization detector and the reference light-scattering detector varied with the fuel. The reference ionization detector seemed to be more sensitive to synthetic materials and the reference light scattering detector seemed to be more senstitive to synthetic materials and the reference light scattering detector seemed to be more sensitive to cellulosic materials. The fuels were ranked based on the responses of the reference ionization detector and the referencelight scattering detector at an optical density of 0.04 per meter. Comparison of these two rankings shows that they were almost exactly reversed to each other. This fuel ranking could not be explained based on the particle diameter alone, indicating that the refractive index and scattering coefficients played an important role.