Citation

Luo MC. J. Fire Sci. 1997; 15(6): 443-461.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1997, SAGE Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Thermocouples have been widely used to measure temperature in research and industry. For the purpose of building fire experiments, the thermocouple has been and will be a major instrument to obtain the temperature field of the fire environment, and hence to quantify the intensity of building fire. It has been found that the radiation error significantly affects the measured temperature using thermocouples. However, this issue has not been carefully investigated in the area of building fire research. A suction pyrometer was designed and applied to a series of fire experiments in a full-scale experimental building-fire facility to avoid the effect of radiation on the measured temperature. It was found that the reading from a bare thermocouple could be more than 100 degrees C higher than the gas temperature obtained from the suction pyrometer during the flaming fire stage and more than 200 degrees C higher during the flashover stage. For a steady-state fire environment obtained from a propane gas burner fire, the radiation error was negligible in the hot upper level near the ceiling. However, the thermocouple significantly overestimated the gas temperature by more than 80 degrees C in the cool lower level near the floor because of the radiation error. The temperature predicted by the computational fluid dynamics model, CESARE-CFD fire model, was in good agreement with the measured temperature after the radiation correction in the lower level and deviated slightly in the upper level.