A model-based approach to estimate sprinkler protections for warehouse storage

Abstract

Experimental and modeling efforts are made to develop a new approach to estimate sprinkler protection requirements for warehouse storage. The approach incorporates different models to predict water penetration effectiveness and critical delivered flux, as well as fire plume/ceiling jet correlations to predict the required sprinkler discharge density and number of sprinkler activations for an adequate protection in various storage configurations. The objective is to develop a reliable and repeatable means to estimate protection requirements for varying practical scenarios (target) based on limited large-scale fire tests (baseline). The newly proposed approach is validated using large-scale fire tests with solid-piled plastic pallets. The validation shows good agreement between modeled results and experimental data with an error less than 20%, when the suppression ratio was similar between target and baseline tests. Overall, this work should be viewed as a step towards a more cost-effective framework for designing fire protection systems.