Effect of ambient temperature and wind speed on horizontal flame spread and combustion trace on typical decorative wood boards

Abstract

Decorative wood boards are common combustible materials and have been utilized in lots of buildings, which could bring serious property loss and casualties due to fires. In order to analyze fire hazard of decorative wood boards, horizontal flame spread characteristics and combustion traces were studied on six typical decorative wood boards though the tunnel furnace test in this paper. It was found that the flame spread distance of all the samples were in power function with time. With the increase of ambient temperature and ambient wind speed, the combustion was more intense, the crack length increased, the flame spread distance, and the flame spread rate (V) all increased, the cracks got wider, the micro appearance damage and the degree of carbonization got more serious. Among them, the relationship between V and the initial temperature difference (Tv-Ti) between solid pyrolysis temperature and the ambient temperature could be expressed as V∼(Tv-Ti)θ and the exponent of the power law θ was −6.24 for the decorative wood boards; the relationship between V and the ambient wind speed (U∞) could be expressed as V ∼ U∞δand δ was 9.0 for the decorative wood boards. In addition, the change rules of C, P and S elements on the combustion residues were similar, which were opposite to the change rule of O.