Characterization of room environments in growing enclosure fires

Abstract

Experimental studies of growing enclosure fires were conducted to test previously derived scaling relationships for characterizing room environments including temperature and combustion product distributions. The scaling laws were derived based upon similarity relationships of steady ceiling flow, and extended to growing fires with consideration of a characteristic convective flow time. To examine the scaling hypothesis, well-defined growing enclosure fires were established, and transient temperatures and species concentrations were measured at different locations below the ceiling. The experimental results show that the nondimensional temperatures and species concentrations correlate well with respect to normalized time and space coordinates, which demonstrated the applicability of the scaling relationships as a means to predict room environments for growing enclosure fires.