Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A methodology was developed to evaluate the maximum hazard posed to the structure of a process facility due to a large flammable liquid pool fire. The hazard evaluation was based on the vertical heat flux profile, which was measured with specially designed instrumentation based on the plate thermometer concept. Testing focused on ethanol, which produced a maximum net heat flux of ~140 kW/m². The effectiveness of various water spray schemes was then evaluated on the relative reduction in the measured heat flux. Discharge densities down to 8.2 mm/min were an effective means of reducing the fire severity to acceptable levels; however, the number and location of the discharging nozzles was shown to be critical to the system performance. For practical application beyond this project, these results were then generalized to predict the failure potential of structural members based solely on basic material properties.