- Author
- Cleary, T. G. | Grosshandler, W. L. | Chernovsky, A.
- Title
- Smoke Detector Response to Nuisance Aerosols.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Book or Conf
- International Conference on Automatic Fire Detection "AUBE '99", 11th. Proceedings. University of Duisburg. [Internationale Konferenz uber Automatischen Brandentdeckung.] March 16-18, 1999, Duisburg, Germany, Luck, H., Editors, 42-51 p., 1999
- Keywords
- fire detection | fire detection systems | smoke detectors | test methods | aerosols | data analysis
- Identifiers
- Fire-Emulator/Detector-Evaluator (FD/DE); nuisance alarms
- Abstract
- The worth of a fire detector is determined as much by its ability not to respond to stimuli that are generated from non-threatening sources as to respond in a timely manner to an actual fire. Photo-electric and ionization smoke detectors react to a greater or lesser degree to all particles that enter the sensing chamber, and, by themselves, the detectors can not distinguish smoke from a nuisance aerosol. The fire-emulator/detector-evaluator (FE/DE) is used to produce smoke and nuisance aerosols representative of what could be present immediately adjacent to an installed detector, and provides a test bed to determine the response of spot-type detectors to physical products (temperature, gases, and smoke) formed in simulated fires, as well as the response to stimuli not associated with a fire threat. The analog output of a multi-sensor detector is measured as a function of aerosol type (peanut oil and clay dust), concentration, and air flow, and is compared to the response of the detector to a flaming fire, and to the extinction of laser light in the FE/DE test section at optical densities up to 0.12 m-1.