Fire Detector Performance Predictions in a Simulated Multi-Room Configurtion.
Fire Detector Performance Predictions in a Simulated
Multi-Room Configurtion.
(380 K)
Cleary, T. G.; Donnelly, M. K.; Mulholland, G. W.;
Farouk, B.
NIST SP 965; February 2001.
International Conference on Automatic Fire Detection
"AUBE '01", 12th. Proceedings. National Institute of
Standards and Technology. March 25-28, 2001,
Gaithersburg, MD, Beall, K.; Grosshandler, W. L.; Luck,
H., Editor(s)(s), 455-469 pp, 2001.
Keywords:
fire detection; fire detection systems; detector
response; heat release rate
Abstract:
Modeling fire detector performance requires detailed
information on the environment surrounding the detector,
the species transport (heat, smoke, gas) from the
surrounding to the sensing surface or volume, and the
sensor response. The species transport to the sensing
surface or volume and the sensor response can be
determined through experiments or modeled if sufficient
detailed information on a particular detector exists.
Here, a fire model (the Fire Dynamics Simulator, FDS)
was used to predict the environment at multiple detector
locations, and the fire emulator/detector evaluator was
used to reproduce the modeled environment at selected
location. FDS was used to compute velocity, temperature,
smoke and CO gas concentrations at detector locations in
each room of a simulated commercial-sized three-room
configuration fire scenario. The simulated fire
consisted of a flaming fire that starts out with a heat
release rate similar to the EN54 TF4 flaming
polyurethane foam mat fire. It transitions to a "medium
t2 fire" after the mat fire reaches its peak output. The
smoke and CO emission are typical of what would be
expected from a flaming plastics fire. The environment
was simulated for 500 seconds, and the output data were
used to program the FE/DE such that it reproduced the
environment, (i.e. temporal values of temperature,
velocity, smoke and CO concentration) at each detector
location. An analog output photo-ion-thermal
multi-sensor detector was placed in the test section
along with an electrochemical CO sensor and the sensor
responses to the emulated conditions were recorded.
Sensor outputs obtained in this manner could be used to
develop or verify multi-sensor, multi-criteria detection
algorithms, be used as input data for the inverse fire
model development, or to predict performance of existing
or new conventional designs or performance-based designs
that have been modeled.
