- Author
- Land, R. I.
- Title
- Test Burns of Mattress and Bedclothes.
- Coporate
- Harvard Univ., Cambridge, MA
- Sponsor
- National Fire Prevention and Control Admin., Washington, DC National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD
- Report
- Home Fire Proj. Tech. Rpt. 24, August 1977, 29 p.
- Contract
- NFPA-GRANT-76-024 NBS-GRANT-G7-0911
- Keywords
- mattresses | clothing | pyrolysis rate
- Identifiers
- test burns
- Abstract
- Six carefully observed burns of mattress form with sheet and ticking are compared with other fire tests of similar material. In particular comparison is made with early stages of the fires in the full-scale testing program. Effects of ambient moisture and the ignition technique are considered in detail. although the burning process appears to be complicated, for more than 100 seconds both the pyrolysis rate and surface spread rate maintain constant exponential growth rates (doubling times). for the cases where the relative humidity is below 50%, a spherical segment model is offered. High relative humidity changes the character of the fire greatly decreasing the spread and pyrolysis rate.