Influence of Ignition Source on the Flaming Fire Hazard of Upholstered Furniture.

摘要

A set of upholstered chairs constructed from five different fabric/foam combinations was subjected to a variety of ignition sources suggested by fire statistics. The sources included a cigarette, a small matchlike flame, an incandescent lamp, a space heater, and a large flame source (CTB 133 equivalent gas burner). The tests were performed in a furniture calorimeter where heat release rate and species production rates were obtained. For any chair type, the time to the peak heat release rate depended on the ignition sequence, but the magnitude of the peak did not, within the scatter of the data for any given chair. HAZARD I, the fire hazard assessment method developed at NIST, was used to quantify the hazard posed by the different ignition scenarios. No deaths were predicted when a working smoke detector was present. When a detector was not present, the results from the limited number of scenarios considered confirm the importance of a low peak heat release rate and a slow rate of rise to lessen the hazard of upholstered furniture fires.