Premium
An exercise in obtaining flame radiation fraction from the cone calorimeter
Author(s) -
Quintiere James G.,
Lyon Richard E.,
Crowley Sean B.
Publication year - 2016
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.2350
Subject(s) - combustion , duct (anatomy) , cone calorimeter , gas burner , combustor , calorimeter (particle physics) , chemistry , mechanics , mass fraction , heat of combustion , adiabatic flame temperature , thermal radiation , thermodynamics , meteorology , optics , physics , char , detector , medicine , organic chemistry , pathology
Summary The radiant fraction of the heat of combustion emitted by flames of burning fuels is an important quantity needed to predict the thermal radiation from pool fires to remote targets and as a local flame parameter in CFD models. Although there are data for radiant fraction of gas flames, there are little data for this parameter for burning solid materials. The sole source of these data is Archie Tewarson, who used the FMGlobal Fire Propagation Apparatus to compute the radiant fraction of the heat of combustion from energy losses associated with enthalpy flow and duct heat losses. This paper describes a similar approach to obtain the radiant fraction of the heat from flames of burning solids using the cone calorimeter. In the present work, the cone calorimeter is calibrated using a Meeker burner with a premixed methane/air flame that is small and blue and has minimum flame radiation. A heat loss correction factor due to thermal conductance from the duct to the ambient air is determined from the calibration by measuring the temperature of the combustion stream in the duct at the gas sampling location. That factor was found to be 13 ± 2 W/K by calibration compared with a theoretical estimate of 9.3 W/K. The effect of the heat capacity of the duct walls is accounted for by de‐convoluting the duct temperature history. The necessary measurements to compute the radiant fraction then become the heat release rate by oxygen consumption, the mass flow rate in the duct, and the gas temperature in the duct at the sampling location. Results were obtained for 15 polymers, eight of which could be compared with data for nominally similar materials obtained by Tewarson. In addition, results are found to be in good agreement with a correlation by Tewarson in terms of combustion efficiency. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.