Warehouse Fire Safety

(PHOTO: A warehouse on fire)

For quite sometime, I have been trying to understand warehouse safey issues. Fire hazard is a major one.

Indian warehouses are still in nascent stage. Raised platform to avoid flooding, usual industry fire extinguishers etc are definitely taken care of.

But a lot more to be done.

In this process, I was reading up Michael Gollner's research. He has come out with a few research papers which are copyrighted.

Nonetheless, responding to my email, Michael has said:

"... we have published two papers in research journals (Fire Safety Journal and Combustion and Flame), and unfortunately both of those publications are copyrighted. I have however, pasted the abstracts of both publications at the bottom of this email.


Our study has not been devoted to finding specific hazards in warehouses - many of these around today are readily known. The problem today is that as we build bigger, implement new materials, and change the way protection systems were designed we are bound to stretch the limits of these systems. Our research, therefore, has not focused on a single warehouse incident. Rather, we are looking at methods that could, theoretically, in the future provide a fundamental basis for ranking stored commodities and designing sprinkler protection to protect ranked commodities.

Our research is looking at future methods, and using representative commodities that are used in full-scale warehouse fire tests.


Hopefully, our research will be a stepping stone for future methods of preventing warehouse fires by accurate ranking and classification of hazards of individual commodities. For now, large-scale testing dominates the field, and many approaches to reducing test scales are always being researched.


Best Regards,


Michael


M.J. Gollner et al. Warehouse Commodity Classification from Fundamental Principles. Part I: Commodity & Burning Rates, Fire Safety Journal, (2011). DOI:10.1016/j.firesaf.2011.03.002

Abstract

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the burning behavior
of an individual Group A plastic commodity over time. The objective of the
study was to evaluate the use of a nondimensional parameter to describe the
time-varying burning rate of a fuel in complex geometries. The nondimensional
approach chosen to characterize burning behavior over time involved
comparison of chemical energy released during the combustion process with
the energy required to vaporize the fuel, measured by a B-number.
The mixed nature of the commodity and its package, involving polystyrene
and corrugated cardboard, produced three distinct stages of combustion
that were qualitatively repeatable. The results of four tests provided flame
heights, mass-loss rates and heat fluxes that were used to develop a phenomenological
description of the burning behavior of a plastic commodity.
Three distinct stages of combustion were identified. Time-dependent and
time-averaged B-numbers were evaluated from mass-loss rate data using
assumptions including a correlation for turbulent convective heat transfer.
The resultant modified B-numbers extracted from test data incorporated
the burning behavior of constituent materials, and a variation in behavior
was observed as materials participating in the combustion process varied.
Variations between the four tests make quantitative values for each stage of
burning useful only for comparison, as errors were high. Methods to extract
the B-number with a higher degree of accuracy and future use of the results
to improve commodity classification for better assessment of fire danger is
discussed.

and this one :

Gollner, M.J., Williams, F.A., and Rangwala, A.S., Upward Flame Spread over Corrugated Cardboard. Combustion and Flame, 2011. In Press. doi:10.1016/j.combustflame.2010.12.005

Abstract

As part of a study of the combustion of boxes of commodities, rates of upward flame spread during early-stage burning were observed during experiments on wide samples of corrugated cardboard. The rate of spread of the flame front, defined by the burning pyrolysis region, was determined by visually averaging the pyrolysis front position across the fuel surface. The resulting best fit produced a power-law progression of the pyrolysis front, x p = Atn, where xp is the average height of the pyrolysis front at time t, n = 3/2, and A is a constant. This result corresponds to
a slower acceleration than was obtained in previous measurements and theories (e.g. n = 2), an observation which suggests that development of an alternative description of the upward flame spread rate over wide, inhomogeneous materials may be worth studying for applications such as warehouse fires. Based upon the experimental results and overall conservation principles it is hypothesized that the non-homogeneity of the cardboard helped to reduce the acceleration of the upward spread rates by physically disrupting flow in the boundary layer close to the vertical surface and thereby modifying heating rates of the solid fuel above the pyrolysis region. As a result of this phenomena, a distinct difference was observed between scalings of peak flame heights, or maximum “flame tip” measurements and the average location of the flame. The results yield alternative scalings that may be better applicable to some situations encountered in practice in warehouse fires.