Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In this paper, the thermal decomposition of plywood is investigated based on the solid mass loss rate (MLR) modeling. The multi-scale approach followed here allows first to establish, at a small scale, the kinetic mechanism during the solid thermal decomposition and then validate it at a larger scale. At small scale, experiments were conducted by using Thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA) coupled to gas analysis with the FTIR technique under nitrogen and air atmospheres for five heating rates. Thermo-gravimetric results were also used to propose a kinetic mechanism for the thermal decomposition of the sample. The kinetic parameters of the different identified reactions were estimated by using an optimization technique, namely the Genetic Algorithms (GA) method. The mass loss rate model predictions show a good agreement with the experimental data.