Incident wall heat flux distributions have been measured for square propane burner fire sources placed against the wall. Peak heat fluxes of 40-120 kw/m2 were measured for heat release rates of 50-500 kw/m2 and burner edge lengths of 0.28-0.7 m. Peak heat fluxes were found to be a strong function of heat release rate but were insensitive to flame aspect ratio or burner size. Correlations of the data were developed to represent the measured flux distributions. These correlations are intended for

more »

... use in wall flame spread modeling. KEYWORDS: heat flux, wall fires, flame heat transfer Over the past decade, a great deal of work has been done in the area of flame spread on vertical and the role of wall covering materials in room fire development9-15. This work has been hampered by a lack of detailed characterization of flames exposing and igniting the wall material. Most commonly used wall materials cannot be casually ignited with small ignition sources. Rather, they require external heating from an adjacent fire such as a waste basket or furniture item. Most investigations of upward flame spread have used line burners as ignition sources. The heat flux distribution from such line burners has been characterized by ~a s e m i~ and has been shown to be very similar to heat flux distributions from wall flames themselves17. Peak heat fluxes in the 20-30 kw/m2 are typical. Thus, most of the work to date has focused on the problem of given an initial burning section will the flame