- Author
- Delichatsios, M. A.
- Title
- Modeling of Aircraft Cabin Fires.
- Coporate
- Factory Mutual Research Corp., Norwood, MA 02062
- Sponsor
- National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD Federal Aviation Administration, Atlantic City Airport, NJ
- Report
- NBS GCR 84-473, September 1984, 114 p.
- Distribution
- Available from National Technical Information Service
- Contract
- N82-NADA3041
- Keywords
- aircraft compartments | aircraft fires | ceilings | char | extinction | fire models | flame height | flame spread | pyrolysis | walls
- Abstract
- In this work, simple fire dynamic models for various components of an aircraft cabin fire are developed. These simple integral models can be incorporated in global zone models for aircraft cabin fires occurring in flight or caused by an impact-survivable crash. The major accomplishment of this work was the development of simple expressions for the burning of vertical walls, simulating, for example, the burning of wall panels in the fuselage. Flame heights of vertical wall fires are predicted and correlated by a simple expression. In addition, critical conditions for extinction of rapid flame spread have been investigated for fires in vertical walls consisting of charring materlals, allowing for the prediction of flame spread rates. These critical conditions were developed based on simple vertical wall burning and flame height correlations, as well as on a simple model for charring pyrolysis. Preliminary analysis of integral models for ceiling flows (such as the along the aircraft cabin ceiling) including combustion indicates that an equation for the decay of turbulence is required for describing such flows. One of the outcomes of this work is the identification of material properties controlling flammability. We are presently developing a laboratory apparatus which should be capable of measuring all key flammability properties (including radiation and charring).