Citation

Nam S. Fire Safety J. 2004; 39(7): 619-642.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

As buildings with a high ceiling clearance are becoming increasingly common, making proper assessments of whether or not the ceiling sprinklers would actuate becomes very critical to designing adequate fire protection systems for such buildings. Two sets of fire test data under high ceiling clearances pertinent to growing 3-dimensaional fires and steady plane pan fires were analyzed to estimate maximum ceiling heights from the given fire sources that would allow actuation of ceiling sprinklers. The threshold fire sizes that would actuate ceiling sprinklers at a given ceiling clearances were also computed for growing fires and steady pan fires. Comparisons of the estimated threshold fire sizes between the growing fires and the pan fires indicate that assessing sprinkler actuations based on pan fire tests, which is a commonly used practice, will be likely to lead to a wrong conclusion. The analysis shows that a much smaller fire size than what pan fire tests might indicate would be needed to actuate sprinklers on high ceilings.