Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The performance of some crimped ribbon flame arresters has been investigated using propane-air mixtures. The arresters were mounted in horizontal tubing systems of various lengths filled with gas mixtures which could be ignited either at the open end or at the closed end of the tube. The velocity of the flame that was just quenched by an arrester was directly proportional to the thickness of the arrester and varied inversely with the size of the crimps, provided that the size was less than the quenching diameter for the gas mixture. A comparison is made of the performance of crimped ribbon and other types of arrester, which demonstrates the high effectiveness in flame quenching that can be obtained with suitable crimped arresters. The theoretical relation previously found between the performance and the structure of perforated sheeting and block arresters was in reasonable agreement with the results for the crimped arresters.