Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Research in combustion toxicology over the past few years has led to a reasonable understanding and even quantification of some of the effects of fire effluent toxicants and, with the availability of a modest amount of both non-human primate and human exposure data, the combustion toxicologist is gaining increasing capability to assess and predict the toxicological effects of smoke inhalation. This paper presents a mathematical approach, based on experimental data for CO, HCN and HC1, for the prediction of both incapacitating and lethal effects on rats exposed to these toxicants. Elementary examples are given for computer simulation of the development of toxic hazards in fires and comparisons are made with actual experimental results. These comparisons show that computer-predicted times to toxicological effects lie within the standard deviation of experimental mean values.