This book covers a wide range of issues in fire safety engineering in tunnels, describes the phenomena related to tunnel fire dynamics, presents state-of-the-art research, and gives detailed solutions to these major issues. Examples for calculations are provided. The aim is to significantly improve the understanding of fire safety engineering in tunnels. Chapters on fuel and ventilation control, combustion products, gas temperatures, heat fluxes, smoke stratification, visibility, tenability, design fire curves, heat release, fire suppression and detection, CFD modeling, and scaling techniques all equip readers to create their own fire safety plans for tunnels. This book should be purchased by any engineer or public official with responsibility for tunnels. It would also be of interest to many fire protection engineers as an application of evolving technical principles of fire safety.
This report presents the results from a series of commodity classification tests. The primary objective of the project was to establish test data for a selection of different commodities. The commodities were chosen such that they were related to the commodity classification scheme used in the forthcoming European Standard prEN 12845, "Fixed fire fighting systems, Automatic sprinkler systems, Design, installation and maintenance." The test arrary consisted of four pallet loads of commodity arranged in a 2 by 1 by 2 rack segment. Each commodity was tested using three different water application delivered densities and water was applied at a predetermined heat release rate. Test results showed significatnt differences in the fire hazard among the tested commodities, however, it can be concluded that most of the commodities, with a few exceptions, had a hazard level that corresponded to the commodity categories given in prEN 12845. With the data obtained from the tests, any commercial commodity could be tested and classified in accordance with the equirements of prEN 12845.
Within the European research project Guidelines for Management of Fires in Chemical Warehouses (TOXFIRE), SP has carried out controlled large-scale combustion experiments with amount of material burned in the 100 kg range. The real challenge was to achieve conditions yielding under-ventilated, i.e. oxygen-depleted, combustions. Most of the large-scale experiments were carried out in the ISO 9705 room with different degrees of restrictions of the size of the door opening. Detailed analyses and characterization of the smoke gas composition were carried out during these tests. A few tests were performed in an even larger scale facility that was built to allow real storage configurations. This was done for comparison with the results from the tests in the ISO 9705 room and the analysis were not as detailed. This report describes the evaluation techniques and calculation procedures used to characterise the fire dynamics such as heat release rate, mass loss rate, mass flow of air and fire gases in the opening of the test compartment, equivalence ratio and combustion efficiency. Much effort was put into developing a 'generalized carbon dioxide generation' scheme for computing the heat release rate. For under-ventilated experiments, when the combustion is far from complete, it is not enough only to study the carbon dioxide generation. Therefore, also the generation of carbon monoxide, soot and unburned hydrocarbons have been included. The generalized CO2 scheme is valuable for use in cases where satisfactory oxygen consumption data cannot be experimentally obtained. Validation tests showed that this method is as good as oxygen consumption calorimetry (OCC) when the correct factor for the energy per kg oxygen consumed (E) was used and it should be better than the general OCC where a constant value, E = 13.1 MJ released energy per kg oxygen consumed, often is used irrespective of material. To experimentally determine the equivalence ratio during a test, a phi meter was constructed. The instrumental set-up is described and the relation to the equivalence ratio explained. Since a majority of the measurements were performed in the compartment opening, it was necessary to know the instant mass flow of gases in the opening. The calculations of the mass flow were based on temperature measurements and the mass loss rate of the fuel. The derivation of a mathematical formula is described in the report.
In the CEC project Guidelines for Management of Fires in Chemical Warehouses, TOXFIRE (EV5V-CT93-0275), carried out by a consortium of seven European partners, SP has carried out controlled large-scale combustions on amounts in the 100 kg range. This report describes experiments performed in the ISO 9705 room. Combustion experiments were successfully carried out under conditions from well ventilated to oxygen depleted on five organic materials with different chemical composition, containing the heteroelements nitrogen, sulfur and chlorine, respectively. The materials studied were polypropene, Nylon, chlorobenzene, chloro-nitro-benzoic acid and tetramethylthiuram monosulfide. A special instrument, a phi-meter, was built and used to measure the equivalence ratio, a measure of the degree of ventilation. To change the ventilation conditions inside the room, the height of the door opening was varied. The fuel pans were put on load cells to measure the mass loss rate. Heat release rate was evaluated from production rates of CO, CO2, soot and unburned hydrocarbons. FTIR was used for on-line measurements of the concentrations of most of the low molar mass species in the smoke leaving through the door opening, chemiluminescence for the nitrogen oxides. Adsorbents were used for the sampling and subsequent analysis of medium size organics. A model developed for calculation of the flow through the door opening allowed the evaluation of yields of the various compounds in the smoke from the concentrations measured. Under-ventilated conditions were achieved as planned. The results obtained were shown to have the expected trends and were reproducible in terms of their dependence on the degree of ventilation.
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