Performance evaluation of water mist with additives in suppressing cooking oil fires based on temperature analysis

Abstract

Cooking oil fires which happened in the kitchen or hotel have become quite popular over the last decades. Compare to other types of fires, cooking oil fires are very difficult to extinguish. Both foam and powder can effectively extinguish the flames over the oil surface but they are very difficult to cool the oil below its auto-ignition temperature and to prevent it from re-ignition due to their limited cooling capacity. Moreover, water mist with additives may be applied to provide additional improvements in terms of suppression effectiveness and temperature control of cooking oil fires. The present work establishes a series of home-scale experiments to study extinguishing mechanisms and effectiveness of pure water and water mist with additives against cooking oil fires. The thermal transient within the test chamber has been evaluated during the fire development as the main quantitative parameter. Results showed that water mist is shown to be efficient in cooking oil fires control, especially endowed with the chosen additives which demonstrated that water mist with additives would extinguish cooking oil fires through physical and chemical mechanisms. Furthermore, the change in fire extinguishing efficiency differs for different additives and mass fractions of the additives.