scenario-based

1

Fire and Combustion

Felicia St. Luce

Columbia Southern University

Fire Behavior and Combustion

Professor James Golden

What are the most common oxidizers in the scenario?

The most common oxidizers in the scenario include oxygen, hydrogen peroxide and the halogens. Oxidizing agents are species which go through a chemical reaction that gains one or more electrons (Natella, Santoro & Spa, 2019).

What are the stages of a fire seen in the scenario?

Incipient stage, radiant heat warms the adjacent fuel and continues the process of pyrolysis. The transfer starts to increase the overall temperature in the room; growth stage, the fire increases due to the availability sufficient oxygen; flashover, the rapid transition to a state of total surface involvement of all the combustible material in the compartment; including but not limited to cotton clothes, cotton fabric on furniture, organic fiber, synthetic foam, chairs or couches.

What occurs when a sufficiently high temperature is created in two rooms where both combustible materials and oxygen are present and restricted in one apartment?

High temperatures exhaust mainly takes place as gas through liquid or solid exhaust products as well. The high temperatures promote the oxidation of nitrogen radicals to NO. Radiant energy becomes intense and will ignite any combustible in its path, causing a flameover or rollover.

On what does the spread mechanism of a fire depend? What occurred in Apartment 2-B, 2-C, or even 2-H?

Moisture content of fuel and velocity of air are among the aspects that the spread mechanism of fire relies on. They determine the speed of the spread as well as other burning characteristics of fire (Hodges, & Lattimer, 2019).

What is the difference between flammability and combustibility in the scenario?

Combustible material is a material which can burn in air, a combustible material ignites with little effort as well as a flammable material catches fire immediately on flame exposure.

Flammability, refers to the ease in which a combustible substance can be ignited, triggering fire or combustion and also explosion.

Describe the differences between flashover, smoke explosion, or backdraft in the scenario.

Backdraft refers to the sudden inclusion of oxygen to a starved fire; flashover refers to the spontaneous combustion of fuel source as a result of excessive heat accumulating the whole room; smoke explosion refers to deflagration of the accumulated unburned fuel in a closed compartment (Rasoulipour, et al., 2020).

References

Hodges, J. L., & Lattimer, B. Y. (2019). Wildland fire spread modeling using convolutional neural networks. Fire technology, 55(6), 2115-2142.

Natella, M., Santoro, F., & Spa, A. (2019). Manned systems for Suborbital flight and related operating scenarios and ground infrastructures analysis. https://webthesis.biblio.polito.it/10332/1/tesi.pdf

Rasoulipour, S., Delichatsios, M., Fleischmann, C., & Chen, Z. (2020). Experimental investigation of underventilated fires in enclosures with two front vertical openings and occurrence of smoke explosions. Fire Safety Journal, 116, 103176.