Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Experimental examination of the process of boilover, especially on the thermal process in the oil-water layers during oil burning, demonstrated that boilover happens only after the oil-water interfacial temperature reaches water's boiling point. And water's seething on the interface results in the emission of micro-explosion noise, which is certainly the premonitory phenomenon of boilover and supplies the fundamental of a new boilover predicting method, i.e., the occurrence of boilover could be predicted by the micro-explosion noise, using noise recognition technique. For this purpose, some characteristics of micro-explosion noise was studied during boilover process, and analyzed in relation with the thermal process on the oil-water interface. In real fire fields, the micro-explosion noise is always contaminated by environment noise. A set of features and a practical noise identification were submitted to identify the micro-explosion noise from background noise and predict the occurrence of boilover.