Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Measurements of the maximum temperature increase in self-heating solids under substantially sub-critical conditions provide useful estimates of rates of heat generation at different temperatures. The purpose of this paper is to calculate theoretically the extent to which these estimates are affected by consumption of reactant during self-heating. It is confirmed that the effect of reactant consumption in this region is considerably less than its effect on the critical condition for thermal explosion. For systems having a heat of reaction high enough to permit sharply defined thermal explosion, the effect of reactant consumption on substantially sub-critical self-heating can be to reduce the maximum temperature by less than 10 per cent.