EXPERIMENTAL TESTING OF TOBACCOSELF-IGNITION TEMPERATURE

Abstract

Fires caused by spontaneous ignition represent a serious occupational and environmental hazard. The process of tobacco self-ignition is slow but it results in tobacco combustion that is hard to extinguish, causing loss and other harmful effects. This is what motivated us to conduct research on the causes and mechanisms of this phenomenon.The results obtained depend on the methods and equipment used. This paper describes the procedure to specify specimen temperature versus ambient temperature on the basis of time.The equipment used and the measuring process are also described in the paper. We concluded that the values of self-ignition temperature are not laboratory constants for certain species of tobacco but variables, which primarily depend on the temperature of the working environment. The data we obtained in the experiment was used to train an RBF (Radial Basis Function) network. After training, the RBF network was able to predict self-ignition temperature for some cases of working environment temperatures that were not considered. Key words:self-ignition, experiment, tobacco samples