Flame Spread Characteristics of Inclined Extruded Polystyrene Thermal Insulation Material

A set of small-scale flame spread experiments was conducted to explore the effects of sample orientation on the flame spread characteristics of extruded polystyrene (XPS) insulation material. The obtained data were employed to show the variation law of flame angle, pool fire zone length and flame spread rate when the tilt angle of XPS material changes from -90° to 90°. The flame angle decreased when the inclined angle increased from -90° to 90° and there are two different variation trends of flame angle in different inclined angle ranges. Meanwhile, both pool fire length and flame spread rate of the inclined XPS material depend on gravity controlled flow of flammable and molten drops produced by heating XPS material. Furthermore, the fitting relationship between flame spread rate and tilt angle was put forward when the tilt angle was less than or equal to 0°. This work is a supplement to the fire risk study on the XPS insulation materials and system.