Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Light scatting characteristic of smoke particles plays an important role for the developing of photoelectric smoke detection technology. An experimental setup is built to measure the Stokes scattering matrix for typical smoke particles. The results show that the non-spherical properties of smoke particles play an important role on their light scattering characteristic. It is also shown that the measured Stokes scattering matrixes are nearly block-diagonal with symmetric relationships between some elements, which suggest that the smoke particles may be randomly oriented. Through comparing the experimental results and the previous theoretical analysis, it is suggested that spheroid models are more suitable than spherical models to analyze the light scattering by smoke particles. The distinctive features of the light scattering by different kinds of smoke particles can be presented based on spheroid models.