Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In this paper the results of a continuing effort to develop a comprehensive compartment fire database for validation of numerical fire modeling is presented. Natural gas fires were conducted inside a full-scale ISO 9705 room and are compared with previous results obtained in a 2/5 scale, reduced-scale enclosure. In these experiments, fires with heat release rates as large as 2.7 MW were used in the full-scale room. Gas species and temperature measurements were made inside the room at several locations in the upper layer and the doorway. Oxygen, CO/CO2, and total hydrocarbon gas analyzers were used in addition to gas chromatography to make gas species measurements. Temperature measurements were made in the upper layer of the room using aspirated thermocouples. Fires as large as 2.7 MW were observed not to produce underventilated compartment fire conditions in the full-scale enclosure despite the large heat release rate and temperatures observed in excess of 1200 °C. A comparison of the gas species in the upper layer of the reduced-scale and full-scale results showed similarities in terms of the gas species volume fractions when plotted as a function of mixture fraction, but the temperature results showed that the full-scale enclosure was reaching higher temperatures than the reduced-scale enclosure.