Experimental measurements, integral modeling and smoke detection of early fire in thermally stratified environments

Building fires go through a series of stages. They start with a fire plume period during which buoyant fire smoke rises to the ceiling. A second stage is the following enclosure smoke-filling period. In this paper, the first stage is the subject, especially for the fire plume behavior in thermally stratified environments in large volume spaces. In NFPA 92B, Morton's integral equation was introduced for calculating the maximum plume rise, and beam smoke detectors were recommended for smoke detection design. In this work, experiments and CFD simulations were conducted in a small-scale enclosure and a large space to investigate early fire movements in temperature-stratified ambients. The results show that in a thermally stratified environment, the axial temperature and velocity of a fire plume decrease more quickly along the vertical axis than in uniform environment, and in some cases the fire plume ceases to rise. The previous integral equation was shown to underestimate the actual maximum height of a fire smoke plume, and also was unable to explain the differences of the maximum heights of low-density and high-density smoke plumes with the same stratification and outlet conditions. The integral equation was improved by introducing two correction factors, and extended for non-linear temperature stratified environments. A light section smoke detection method with three space-protected area was suggested and discussed.