Application of full-scale fire tests to characterize and improve the aircraft postcrash fire environment

Sarkos, Constantine P.

doi:10.1016/s0300-483x(96)03496-8

Cited by 18 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…The fire experiment was undertaken by the FAA using their C-133 test article [3][4][5]. The fully furnished C-133 fuselage test was reported in [5] and further discussed in [3].…”

Section: The Post-crash Fire Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Flashover is a critical point in post-crash cabin fire where the fire rapidly grows to engulf the entire cabin [2,3]. The time to flashover is generally considered to mark the end of the survivability period for those passengers still within the cabin.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The time to flashover is generally considered to mark the end of the survivability period for those passengers still within the cabin. For many years, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has undertaken a number of full-scale fire tests involving large external pool fires and furnished cabins to evaluate the nature of the link between burning cabininterior materials and passenger survivability [3][4][5]. Through this work the FAA has developed a test scenario for post-crash fires consisting of an intact fuselage with an opening about the size of a Type A exit (1.06 × 1.93 m) adjacent to an external fuel fire.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study the model developed and used in [13,14,16,17] is applied to investigate the characteristics of the flame spread over cabin interiors in one of the experiments in [3][4][5]. In this paper, the full-scale aircraft-fire experiment [5] is described followed by the fire model and simulation setup.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation of a Post-Crash Aircraft Fire Test

Wang

Jia

Galea

et al. 2013

Journal of Aircraft

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In this paper the computational fluid dynamics fire-field model SMARTFIRE is used to simulate a full-scale aircraft-cabin fire test conducted within the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration furnished C-133 test facility in order to provide further validation for the software. The experiment involves exposing the interior cabin materials to an external fuel fire, noting the subsequent spread of the external fire to the cabin interior and the onset of flashover, which occurs at approximately 210 s. The computational fluid dynamics fire simulations presented in this study make use of a range of sophisticated sub-models including a flame-spread model, the eddy-dissipation model, a toxicity model, and a multi-ray radiation model. The models' ability to simulate the fire conditions within the aircraft cabin is demonstrated through its ability to 1) reproduce the measured trends in temperatures and heat fluxes at the seat tops, 2) reproduce toxic gases concentrations at locations of interest, 3) provide a reasonable prediction of the time to flashover (220 s), and 4) produce reasonable agreement with the observed fire dynamics. The predicted time to flashover is shown to be sensitive to material properties such as ignition temperature of seat materials and not very sensitive to the cabin panel thickness.

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“…The fire experiment was undertaken by the FAA using their C-133 test article [3][4][5]. The fully furnished C-133 fuselage test was reported in [5] and further discussed in [3].…”

Section: The Post-crash Fire Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation of a Post-Crash Aircraft Fire Test

Wang

Jia

Galea

et al. 2013

Journal of Aircraft

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“…However, the fire scenario must be more complicated because of multiple exits opened for evacuation in a real post-crash aircraft fire [16]. Additionally, a full-scale fire test takes a lot of time and money, and it is unable to collect the data from different fire scenarios [17].…”

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confidence: 99%

Performance Simulation of Evacuation Procedures in Post-Crash Aircraft Fires

Zhang

Hanpeng

Zhao

et al. 2014

Journal of Aircraft

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It is crucial to guide airplane passengers in effectively choosing reasonable evacuation exits, according to the consequences of evacuation in post-crash accidents. This paper presents a performance simulation method to analyze the safety of the evacuation procedures. The temperature and the concentration of carbon monoxide are pointed out as the main threats during the evacuation. Thus, the modified formulas of these two hazard factors are defined as the safety lines to measure the overrun of each indicator. The Fire Dynamics Simulator and Pathfinder are used to measure the available safe egress time and the required safe egress time, respectively, for each exit in an A380 aircraft. The available exits are determined to ensure the safety of passengers, based on the time interval between the available safe egress time and the required safe egress time. According to the simulation, the flashover cannot happen within 90 s, and many passengers who choose exits 3 and 5 are in danger during the evacuation. The utilization rates of the three exits in the upper cabin are very low. This paper proposes an optimized evacuation plan to ensure the safety of passengers.Nomenclature C = concentration of carbon monoxide, ppm C CO = real-time concentration of the carbon monoxide, ppm C CO = average concentration of carbon monoxide, ppm dt = time step T = air temperature,°C T E = real-time temperature,°C T E = average temperature,°C t = time limit of endurance, s V = poison load Y = probability variable

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Fire‐resistant elastomers

et al. 2003

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SUMMARYThe molecular design of semi-inorganic polymers has produced polysilphenylene-siloxane and polyphosphazene elastomers having comparable fire safety to heat resistant engineering plastics. In flaming combustion a polyphosphazene rubber had a four times lower peak heat release rate than the polyurethane elastomer currently used in fire-blocked aircraft seat cushions. Figure 1. In 1987 the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed federal airworthiness regulation (FAR) 25.853c on the flammability of aircraft seat cushions to delay their involvement in cabin fires [4,5]. This test for flammability of seat cushions involves subjecting a fully constructed seat cushion (e.g. Figure 2) to an oil burner flame for 2 min (Figure 3) and recording the mass loss of the cushion and the burn length. The FAA requirements are that the burn length of the cushion should not exceed 43 cm ð17 inÞ and the mass loss should not exceed 10% of the original weight. Manufacturers responded to these regulations by wrapping the polyurethane seat cushion in a fire resistant barrier fabric [3,5] (Figure 2). Seat fire blocking allowed manufacturers to pass the 2 min FAA certification test but the polyurethane foam burns vigorously when the fire blocking layer has been consumed (Figure 1). More recently, combustion-modified polyurethane foam rubbers have been developed [6], some of which pass the FAA seat cushion flammability test without the need for a fire blocking layer [7,8]. These second-generation aircraft seat cushions

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Application of full-scale fire tests to characterize and improve the aircraft postcrash fire environment

Cited by 18 publications

References 1 publication

Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation of a Post-Crash Aircraft Fire Test

Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation of a Post-Crash Aircraft Fire Test

Performance Simulation of Evacuation Procedures in Post-Crash Aircraft Fires

Fire‐resistant elastomers

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