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Experimental study of the burning behavior of n ‐heptane pool fires at high altitude
Author(s) -
Zhou Zhihui,
Yao Wei,
Hu Xiaokang,
Yuen Richard,
Wang Jian
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
fire and materials
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.482
H-Index - 58
eISSN - 1099-1018
pISSN - 0308-0501
DOI - 10.1002/fam.2270
Subject(s) - altitude (triangle) , combustion , environmental science , intensity (physics) , atmospheric sciences , effects of high altitude on humans , meteorology , chemistry , geology , physics , mathematics , optics , geometry , organic chemistry
Summary The same configured calorimeters were built in Hefei (99.8 kPa) and Lhasa (66.5 kPa), respectively. Four sizes of round pans with diameters of 10, 15, 20, and 25 cm were adopted to study the effect of high altitude on the burning behavior of liquid pool fires. Analysis on the burning rate obtained in this study and in the literature at different altitudes indicates that pressure fire modeling performs better than radiation fire modeling in correlating the burning intensity (burning rate per unit area) with pressure and pool diameter for cases under low ambient pressure. The study also shows that heat release rate and combustion efficiency decrease at higher altitude. For medium pool fires, the burning intensity and heat release rate are proportional to D 5/2 , thus the combustion efficiency being independent on pool sizes but decreases at higher altitude by a factor approximate to the pressure ratio. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.