Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The cone calorimeter and the Fire propagation apparatus are often used to carry out flammability analyses of materials. Among the numerous differences between these two devices, the impact of the heat sources has been studied by other means that time to ignition measurements as performed in past studies. In particular, visual observations, mass loss rate and temperature measurements are used to analyze the impact on the pyrolysis behavior of the two types of heaters on clear PMMA and wood samples. The mechanism, of in-depth radiation absorption and the wavelength dependency of this one are the main reasons for the different pyrolysis behavior observed.