Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In the present paper, the effect of ventilation and burning area on the mass burning rate in compartment fires was studied through the reduce scale model experiments. It was found that they both determine the compartment fire behavior and their common effect could be expressed by the ratio of Pog ½AH½ /Av, on the basis of which the regions of various fire characteristics were divided. Based on experimental results, according to steady-state energy balance on fuel surface, a new simple model was proposed in which the mass burning rate can be calculated as a function of ventilation parameter and fuel surface area, and the critical conditions for the transition between various fire characteristics were obtained. The calculated results were in good agreement with the experimental data and the previous researches.