Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the key physics of sprinkler-based fire suppression and associated water-film transport. The objective was to evaluate experimental methods for their appropriateness in studying the key physics, and provide validation data for numerical modeling. The numerical model is currently under development to simulate sprinkler-based suppression of large-scale, rack-storage fires. Individual experimental techniques were explored to study water absorption, surface flow, evaporation, and suppression on vertically arranged, corrugated cardboard surfaces. In addition, water transport was investigated in full-scale rack storage configurations. The experimental results show that the tested experimental techniques are appropriate to study the key phenomena related to sprinkler-based fire suppression.