Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Apartments and housings without sprinklers are very susceptible to fire damages during the absence of human being or only in the presence of the children and the elders. New automatic fire extinguishers can play a very important role to reduce this kind of fire damages. This study revealed that the reaction temperature and response time of the heat detectors are greatly influenced by fusible metal thickness and heating rates. Reaction time varied from 139 seconds to 490 seconds depending upon the room sizes and detector positions. Response time less than 60 seconds requires fusible metals with lower melting point and higher position of the extinguisher. Fusible metal was shown to be more sensitive to the lower heating rate. The thickness of the fusible metal with 0.2mm and the cap thickness of 0.7mm was found to reduce the response time to 40 seconds.