Abstract
In 2017, more than 60,000 firefighters and oilfield-workers injuries and fatalities occurred while they were working under various thermal hazards such as flame, radiant heat, steam, etc., or due to their significant heat stress related discomfort. The majority of these burn injuries and fatalities results from an inadequate protection and comfort provided by firefighters’ and oilfield-workers’ fire protective polymeric textile materials used in their workwear. Hence, both the thermal protective and thermo-physiological comfort performance of fabrics used in workwear significantly contribute to limit firefighters’ and oilfield-workers’ skin burns and heat stress. Considering this, previous studies have focused on characterizing and developing empirical models to predict the protective and comfort performance based on physical properties of the fabrics. However, there are still some technical knowledge gaps in the existing literature related to this. This paper critically reviewed the literature on characterization and modeling of thermal protective and thermo-physiological comfort performance of fire protective textile fabric materials. The key issues in this field have been indicated in order to provide direction for the future research and advance this scientific field for better protection and comfort of the firefighters and oilfield-workers.
Highlights
In 2017, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) reported 64 firefighter fatalities and 58,835 firefighter injuries in more than 1 million fire incidents occurred in USA [1,2,3]
Thickness and weight of fabrics affected the thermal protective performance; double layered fabrics had much higher than the single-layered fabrics
Thermal protective performance of single-layered fabrics was affected by changes in the intensity of the flame exposure, the thickness and weight of the fabric affected the thermal protective performance
Summary
In 2017, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) reported 64 firefighter fatalities and 58,835 firefighter injuries in more than 1 million fire incidents occurred in USA [1,2,3]. In order to understand the performance of fire protective textiles, many researchers have investigated the thermal environments faced by these workers [8,10,11,12,13] Through these investigations, it has been established that firefighters’ and oilfield-workers’ are exposed to flames, radiant heat, hot surface contact, steam, and hot liquids of varying intensities and durations. The thermal protective performance of the fabrics was evaluated using the test methods developed by many national and international organizations such as ASTM, International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and NFPA [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,65] These studies have characterized the fabrics in order to recognize and explain fabric properties significantly affecting the thermal protective performance. By employing these significant properties, some of these studies have developed models for predicting the thermal protective performance of fabrics
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