- Author
- Cooper, L. Y.
- Title
- Compartment Fire-Generated Environment and Smoke Filling.
- Coporate
- National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD
- Report
- NFPA SFPE 88,
- Book or Conf
- SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering. 1st Edition. Section 2. Chapter 7, National Fire Protection Assoc., Quincy, MA, 2/116-138 p., 1988
- Keywords
- compartment fires | smoke | fire safety | building design | room fires | smoke spread | computer models | egress | fire growth | smoke filling
- Abstract
- The following generic problem must be solved if one is to be able to establish the fire safety of building designs: Given--Initiation of a fire in a compartment or enclosed space; Predict--The environment that develops at likely locations of occupancy, at likely locations of fire/smoke sensor hardware (e.g., detectors and sprinkler links), and in locations of safe refuge and along likely egress paths; Compute--The time of fire/smoke sensor hardware response and the time of onset of conditions untenable to life and/or property. This computation would be carried out from the above predictions, using known response characteristics of people, hardware, and materials. The above is only a simple sketch of the overall problem that is likely to be associated with the interesting details of many real fire scenarios. This chapter will describe some of the key phenomena that occur in compartment fires, and it will focus on smoke filling which is one of the simplest quantitative global descriptions of these phenomena. A specific smoke-filling model will be presented, and solutions to its model equations will be discussed along with example applications.