Citation

Coppa P, LaMalfa A. J. Fire Sci. 1997; 15(3): 180-202.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1997, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Visibility of escape routes is most important to guarantee the safety of people indoors during fires. In the case of a fire, visibility is strongly influenced by the smoke present in the room. In the present work, the extinction coefficient of the visible light has been experimentally measured in the presence of the smoke produced by four different test fires, named TF2, TF3, TF4, and TF5. Tests have been carried out in a specially suited test room in the Italian Fire Department Research Center, provided with instruments to measure the optical density of smoke and the spectral extinction coefficient. The results show that, between the smokes produced in the test fires, TF3 behaves as the most absorbent one, for the so-called white smokes (with a predominance of particles of condensed liquid), and TF4 for the black smokes (with predominantly soot particles). Results can also be used to quantitatively calculate the light intensity reduction due to the possible fire that could be produced in a room, in order to properly design the emergency lighting system of the escape ways. Verification tests with a normal emergency lamp have been performed to cheek this statement. A difference between the computed and measured reduction of illuminance has been discovered, and can be ascribed to a large amount of scattered Light in the white smokes.