The flammability of upholstered furniture is a major concern to engineers and others across a wide swath of organizations. This book was written to provide its audience with the science and engineering needed to better understand the combustibility of the products they manufacture, purchase, and try to extinguish. It addresses the science and engineering information needs of public and private sector fire technology personnel, including fire service students and officers, fire investigators, fire protection engineers, government officials; textile, chemical, and furniture industry personnel, or institutional furniture purchasers.
From the publisher's website: "The Handbook is a massive resource, consisting of 1116 pages, tightly set in a 2-column, 8.5" x 11" (215 x 280 mm) format. The book includes 627 black-and-white figures, 447 tables, and 140 color plates. The Handbook is divided into two main sections: Chapters 1 through 13 include presentations of the fundamental principles of ignition sources and of the response of ignitable materials to heat or energy in various forms. Chapters 14 and 15 constitute an "encyclopedia of ignition," containing extensive information on individual materials, devices, and products. Chapter 14 comprises alphabetically-arranged narrative descriptions of ignition properties and hazards for substances ranging from "Accelerants in incendiary fires" to "Zirconium." Chapter 15 contains database tables giving information on 473 pure chemical compounds and over 500 commercial or natural products, including such substances as dusts, fuels, lubricants, plastics, and woods.
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.
The flammability of upholstered furniture is a major concern to engineers and others across a wide swath of organizations. This book was written to provide its audience with the science and engineering needed to better understand the combustibility of the products they manufacture, purchase, and try to extinguish. It addresses the science and engineering information needs of public and private sector fire technology personnel, including fire service students and officers, fire investigators, fire protection engineers, government officials; textile, chemical, and furniture industry personnel, or institutional furniture purchasers.
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