Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A series of large-scale fire suppression tests was conducted for two different commodities stored in steel racks of different heights, and were analyzed using a global heat balance model. In these tests, water was applied uniformly on top of the storage array at selected fire sizes to determine the fire suppressibility for a commodity at a given storage height. A fire suppression parameter was used to correlate the fire suppression results of these tests. The fire suppression parameter is a function of fuel density, fuel specific heat, ignition temperature, heat of combustion, burning rate, heat of pyrolysis, and water application rate. The data indicate that the combustible packaging and overall storage arrangement have significant impact on the magnitude of the critical water density for fire suppression.