- Author
- Ingason, H.
- Title
- In-Rack Fire Plumes.
- Coporate
- Lund Univ., Sweden
- Report
- Paper 6, 1996, 15 p.
- Book or Conf
- International Association for Fire Safety Science. Fire Safety Science. Proceedings. Fifth (5th) International Symposium. March 3-7, 1997, Intl. Assoc. for Fire Safety Science, Boston, MA, Melbourne, Australia, Hasemi, Y., Editors, 333-344 p., ['1996', '1997']
- Keywords
- fire plumes | pallet storage | heat release | temperature | velocity
- Identifiers
- convective heat release rate; in-rack plume flow; in-rack temperature; in-rack velocity
- Abstract
- A theoretical and experimental study of in-rack fire plumes in a combustible rack storage is presented. The commodity used in the experiments consisted of multiple-wall corrugated paper cartons equally separated in a steel rack, two cartons wide, two cartons deep and four cartons high. Free-burn tests were carriedout mostly in reduced scale with verification in full scale. The centerline in-rack gas temperatures and velocities were measured at four elevations inside the rack storage and the heat release rate was measured above the rack storage with a hood system. In-rack temperatures and velocities are plotted using theoretically obtained quasi-steady correlations assuming a point source of buoyancy at floor level and entrainment only in the vertical flues. The theoretical correlations include convective heat release rate, vertical flue width and height above the floor. Temperatures for both reduced scale and full scale correlate reasonably well with the theoretically obtained relationships which have the same functional form as convective plume flow above a linear fire source (line plume). In order to obtain similar correspondance for the velocity in the two scales it was necessary to use Froude number scaling with storage height as length scale. This does not comply with the results of the line plume model which indicates constant velocity independent of elevation height.