- Author
- Kung, H. C. | You, H. Z. | Han, Z.
- Title
- Effects of Water Discharge Rate and Drop Size on Spray Cooling in Room fires.
- Coporate
- Factory Mutual Research Corp., Norwood, MA
- Book or Conf
- Combustion Institute/Eastern States Section. Chemical and Physical Processes in Combustion. Fall Technical Meeting, 1984. December 3-5, 1984, Clearwater Beach, FL, 30/1-4 p., 1984
- Keywords
- room fires | fire fighting equipment | sprinkler systems | fire protection | pool fires | cooling | drop sizes | carbon balance method | hexanes | automatic sprinkler systems
- Identifiers
- spray cooling; water discharge rate
- Abstract
- Water has been historically the most commonly used agent to suppress fire. Means of delivering water to a fire by automatic sprinkler system was introduced about a century ago. Recently, sprinkler protection has gained considerable acceptance in residential buildings. In this study, a large test room was used to explore the effect of room size on spray cooling. The fire source was a heptane spray fire with constant heptane flow rate. Convective heat flux through the room opening was measured with a large calorimeter. The heat release rate was derived from the calorimeter measurements using the carbon balance method. The effects of fire size, sprinkler discharge rate, and median drop size of sprinkler spray on the spray heat absorption rate and the convective heat flux leaving the room have been investigated.