Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

An experimental study has been performed to examine the effects of an adhesive on flame spread phenomena. To characterize these effects, samples having simple structure, i.e., filter paper sheets permeated with two kinds of resins were utilized for downward flame spread experiments. It is shown that the assumption of a constant mass burning rate for flame spread over thin solid sheets is not always valid, especially for flame spread over a sample of material permeated with resin. The observed decrease of the mass burning rate with increasing mass per unit area of polyvinyl acetate resin in the samples cannot be interpreted only in terms of thermal mechanisms. Further, it is pointed out that a mechanism which limits heat transfer to the inside of the gasifying solid is required to explain the observed rapid reduction of the flame spread rate with increasing amounts of permeated urea resin.