An Experimental Analysis of the Warehouse Pallet Impact in Terms of Fire Loading

摘要

The fire behaviour of goods pallets is a crucial element for characterising the warehouse fire hazard. Characteristics of the fire depend not only of the nature of the goods but of the nature and quantity of the packaging, commonly composed by combustibles as cardboard or plastic too. Consequently fire tests were managed for real pallets, including packaging, for different nature of goods. One of the main issue in such test consists in being representative of the warehouse storage configuration because of interaction between pallets during fire propagation. A test protocol is proposed here to take account of fire in the neighborhood, at the ground level, by introducing a previously calibrated wood pallet fire. Results are given for three different food pallets. The first is composed by fresh salad with the main interest to include a large amount of plastic punnets. The second is composed by frozen meat to show the influence of the frozen water included in the foods on the fire development. The last one is a frozen butter pallet to highlight the specific behaviour of a liquifiable product. Finally, while several calorimetric methods are available, none can consider differently the sample matter than the wood aggression, to determine their relative specific contribution to the global heat release rate.