An Experimental Evaluation of Visibility in Simulated Smoke

Abstract

Research in fire safety engineering is greatly impacted both by the fact that the experiments in this particular branch often have a low repeatability due to the destructive nature of the testing, and the impossibility to expose test subjects to real fire conditions. Finding appropriate representations of the real phenomena of fire that are more limited in the dangers they pose to researchers and test subjects and provide a more repeatable approach to fire safety engineering testing is of paramount importance. This paper proposes a full scale experiment for determining some of the optical properties for artificial, non-toxic smoke and provides a methodology that can be used to assess the impact that non-toxic smoke can have on visibility in a compartment. The results can be used in further research regarding firefighter training, people evacuation from smoke-filled enclosures, smoke exhaust in buildings and CFD representations of these applications.