- Author
-
Weinert, D. W.
|
Cleary, T. G.
|
Mulholland, G. W.
- Title
- Size Distribution and Light Scattering Properties of Test Smokes.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
Victoria University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
- Report
-
NIST SP 965
February 2001
- Book or Conf
- International Conference on Automatic Fire Detection "AUBE '01", 12th. Proceedings. National Institute of Standards and Technology. March 25-28, 2001,
Gaithersburg, MD,
Beall, K.; Grosshandler, W. L.; Luck, H., Editors,
58-70 p.,
2001
- Keywords
-
fire detection
|
fire detection systems
|
smoke detectors
|
smoke generation
|
size distribution
|
sampling
|
light scattering
- Identifiers
- fire emulator/detector evaluator; fractal scattering of smoke; non-flaming smoke; polarization ratio; smoke agglomerates; smoke characterization
- Abstract
- Measurements of particles size distributions and optical properties of smoke detector test smokes may yield a better understanding of existing detector designs and facilitate design improvements; NIST is making such measurements now on smokes produced in the fire emulator/detector evaluator (FE/DE). Results are presented for the first time of the mass scattering cross section (m2.g-1) of one flame generated (propylene) and two non-flaming fire generated tests smokes (cotton smolder, wood pyrolysis). Size characterization shows that the smoke from pyrolysed wood blocks is a unimodal distribution with a MMAD of 1.55 mm, while the smoldered cotton wick fuel has a bimodal distribution with a MMAD of 0.31 mm for its measurable mode. It was found that 48D% of the mass of the cotton wick smoke was below 0.056 mm. The ratio of polarization and the degree of linear polarization have been demonstrated as a means of distinguishing between soot from flaming fires and smoke particles from non-flaming fires. The ratio of polarization is shown to be more sensitive than the degree of polarization to soots from different flaming fuels. Three flame generated smokes (acetylene, ethylene and propylene) are shown to have similar q-plots, which are easily distinguished from the q- plots for the non-flaming fuels smokes.