Warehouse commodity classification from fundamental principles. Part II: Flame heights and flame spread

In warehouse storage applications, it is important to classify the burning behavior of commodities and rank them according to their material ammability for early re detection and suppression operations. In this study, a preliminary approach towards commodity classication is presented that models the early stage of large-scale warehouse res by decoupling the problem into separate processes of heat and mass transfer. Two existing nondimensional parameters are used to represent the physical phenomena at the large-scale: a mass transfer number that directly incorporates the material properties of a fuel, and the soot yield of the fuel that controls the radiation observed in the large-scale. To facilitate modeling, a mass transfer number (or B-number) was experimentally obtained using mass-loss (burning rate) measurements from bench-scale tests, following from a procedure that was developed in Part I of this paper. Two fuels are considered: corrugated cardboard and polystyrene. Corrugated cardboard provides a source of aming combustion in a warehouse and