- Author
- Pitts, W. M.
- Title
- Chemical Stability of Upper-Layer Fire Gases.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Book or Conf
- Combustion Institute/Eastern States Section. Chemical and Physical Processes in Combustion. Proceedings. Fall Technical Meeting, 24th. October 14-16, 1991, Ithaca, New York, 86/1-4 p., 1991
- Keywords
- combustion | chemical stability | fire gases | carbon monoxide | experiments | combustion products | kinetics | mixing
- Abstract
- Over 4500 people are killed annually in the United States as the result of building fires. Studies have shown that roughly two-thirds of these victims have carboxyhemoglobin levels in their bloodstreams sufficient to cause incapacitation or death. Formation mechanisms for the production of high levels of CO in enclosure fires are not well characterized. As a result, it is impossible to accurately predict CO generation rates during enclosure fires. NIST has initiated a long-term project aimed at characterizing the production of CO by fires and developing a predictive capability for the generation of this important fire toxicant. Two minimum requirements for the correlations to remain valid in enclosure fires are that the generation rates of combustion products by the fire plume remain unchanged and that the upper-layer gases outside of the fire plume do no react. In this paper the reaction behavior of the products of combustion observed in the hood experiments is characterized using a full-kinetic model in conjunction with two idealized mixing models.