Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The objective of this work was to provide measurements from reduced-scale experiments for use in the NIST Fire Dynamics Simulator, a computational fluid dynamics model that calculates fire growth, spread, sprinkler activation, and water suppression of rack-storage commodity fires. The model requires implementable sub-grid algorithms and corresponding data that adequately represent the full-scale heat and mass transfer that occurs in a warehouse fire with rack-storage of a standard commodity. This paper describes experiments that investigated the effect of water application on the time to ignition and the heat release rate of the Group A Plastic Commodity. Several types of experiments were conducted including small-scale ignition measurements using the LIFT device and the cone calorimeter, and moderate-scale heat release rate measurements using oxygen consumption calorimetry. Both ignition and heat release rate measurements were made with and without water application. The results showed that the heat release rate is adequately described as a function of the water application rate in a form suitable for implementation in a CFD fire model.