• Fire Science and Engineering
• /
• v.21 no.4
• /
• pp.1-11
• /
• 2007

This study aims to investigate, review, and summarize the definition, development, and applications of "percent agent in pipe", "percent of agent in pipe" which is used as a key factor in testing and evaluating the performance of gaseous fire extinguishing agents, including Halon 1301 and $CO_2$. This study also analyzes and compares the local and international standards on testing and evaluating the performance of gaseous fire extinguishing systems, as well as the results of system performance tests conducted as a part of performance evaluation and approval programs for gaseous fire extinguishing systems, especially, Korean Gaseous Fire Extinguishing System Performance Approval Program called KFI Approval. Percent agent in pipe was defined first in NFPA 12A, Standard on Halon 1301 Fire Extinguishing Systems, dating back to the 1970's. After the phaseout of Halon 1301 systems in 1994 in the developed countries, the percent agent in pipe has been widely used in Halon 1301 alternative clean agent fire extinguishing systems, both halocarbon clean agent systems and inert gas clean agent systems, as an essential criterion to assure the system design accuracy, determine the limitations and performance of a system, and to predict the system performance results accurately, especially, in association with their system flow calculations. Underwriters Laboratories has their own standards such as UL 2127 and 2166 applying percent agent in pipe in testing and evaluating the performance of clean agent fire extinguishing systems. As a part of a system performance test and approval program called KFI Approval System, Korea also has started to apply the percent agent in pipe as a key factor to test, evaluate, and approve the performance of gaseous fire extinguishing systems, including both high and low pressure $CO_2$ systems, from the early 2000's. This study outlines and summarizes the relevant UL and KFI standards and also describes the actual test resultant data, including the maximum percents of agent in pipe for gaseous fire extinguishing systems. As evidenced in lots of tests conducted as a part of the system performance test and approval programs like KFI Approval System, it has been proven that the percent agent in pipe may work as a key factor in testing, evaluating, and determining the limitations and performance of gaseous fire extinguishing systems, especially compared with the hydraulic flow calculations of computer design programs of gaseous fire extinguishing systems, and will remain as such in the future. As one thing to note, however, there are some difficulties in using the unified percent agent in pipe to determine the maximum lengths of pipe networks for gaseous fire extinguishing systems, because the varying definitions used by some of the flow calculations (not in accordance with NFPA 12A definition) make it impossible to do any direct comparison of pipe lengths based on percent agent in pipe.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.29 no.2
• /
• pp.18-23
• /
• 2014

Foam extinguishing agent is widely used for extinguishing combustible liquid fires. Compared to other foam type extinguishing agents, protein foam has relatively low cost and low toxicity and produces stable foam blanket which is excellent in heat resistance and sealability, despite it has weak fluidity. Therefore the study investigated foaming characteristics followed by various factors affecting the fluidity of the protein foam extinguishing agent. The extinguishing characteristics differentiated by the changes in fluidity were also experimented. Foaming performance was compared by measuring the expansion ratio and the 25% drainage time. Moreover, the 25% drainage time and the extinguishing time was compared. The results showed that the 25% drainage time and the expansion ratio were increased as the pressure of nozzle and the concentration of hydrolyzed protein liquid enlarged. However the foaming and extinguishing performance were not improved when the condition exceeded certain level of pressure and concentration. The fastest fire extinguishing condition was the nozzle pressure 4bar with the 85wt.% of concentration of hydrolyzed protein liquid.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.33 no.3
• /
• pp.46-51
• /
• 2018

A basic sprinkler system is a fire extinguishing system that can be easily installed in a fire-vulnerable place such as a publicly used establishments. However, the publicly used establishments are not only complicated in structure, but also have a large amount of flammable interior materials, and the users are not normally in a normal state, which is a very dangerous fire-fighting object. Therefore, due to the low fire extinguishing performance of the basic sprinkler system installed in the publicly used establishments, the fire suppression control can not be performed quickly in case of fire, which may increase the life and property damage. In this study, the cases of quantitative changes of extinguishing water used in basic sprinkler system and the cases of addition of additives such as wetting agents, reinforced agents to improve extinguishing performance were compared. Experimental results showed that the extinguishing performance was improved as the quantity of extinguishing water increase and the reinforced agents showed similar performance to that of 60% increase in the amount of extinguishing water. The cooling time to $200^{\circ}C$ and oxygen concentration were improved up to 14.3% and 34.5%, respectively. In the case of using the wetting agent, the cooling time to $200^{\circ}C$ and oxygen concentration did not show any significant improvement, but showed the effect of preventing deep seated fire. In order to prevent loss of life and property, it is necessary to improve the performance of the basic sprinkler system by increasing amount of extinguishing water or using additives like reinforced agents.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.34 no.3
• /
• pp.28-35
• /
• 2019

Dry water is a core-shell structured powder which comprises a very fine water core covered with hydrophobic silica particles. Recently, the dry water has attracted attention as a new type of fire extinguishing agents. However, characteristics of the dry water as a fire extinguishing agent have not been revealed until now. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to uncover effects of particle size of the dry water on the fire extinguishing performance. Pristine dry water, which has heterogeneous particle size distribution, was carefully separated by sieving method into three fractions which were a small size (ca. $110{\mu}m$) fraction, a medium size (ca. $220{\mu}m$) fraction and a large size (ca. $400{\mu}m$) fraction. Microscopic observations confirmed the effective separation of dry water's particle size. In extinguishing tests of wood cribs fire, the medium size dry water showed most excellent fire extinguishing performance, as compared to other dry waters having small (ca. $110{\mu}m$) and large (ca. $400{\mu}m$) particle size. The good performance of the medium size (ca. $220{\mu}m$) dry water may be attributed to the balance between cooling effect of the water core and smothering effect of the silica particles. It is also revealed that small size dry water has poor flowability than large size dry water.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.28 no.6
• /
• pp.23-28
• /
• 2013

In order to improve extinguishing performance of water mist, many studies of additives have been conducted. In this study, viscosity agent which has the ability to improve extinguishing performance by adhering to the surface on fire was used and fluorine-free surfactant was also added to water to enhance water's wetting ability. This study aimed to verify optimal concentration of extinguishing of additives according to fire source and extinguishing performance by comparison with pure water. In case of wood crib fire, the results show that flame suppression and extinguishing time of sodium alginate 0.4 wt.% are 3.4 times and 2.2 times shorter than those of pure water in 0.2 MPa respectively. It seems that large amount of water adhere to surface on fire, thus cooling effect on surface was enhanced. Also water consumption of sodium alginate 0.4wt.% is up to 65% lower than that of pure water. In case of heptane fire, extinguishing time of cocobetaine 0.1 wt.% is 9.7 times shorter than that of pure water in 0.2 MPa. It is thought that because cocobetaine can block oxygen and suppress oil mist by making emulsion film on fire surface due to a low surface tension. On the other hand, water consumption of cocobetaine 0.1 wt.% is 92% lower than that of pure water.

• Fire Science and Engineering
• /
• v.28 no.2
• /
• pp.20-25
• /
• 2014

In this study, the extinguishing performance evaluation of wetting agent for wood crib was conducted by using a scale model equipment that we designed. To confirm the optimal conditions of the experiment, a test was changed amount of fire extinguishing water and the number of timber. As a result, the discrimination of the fire extinguishing performance was seen only when 20 pieces of wood and the extinguishing water of 100 mL were used. After evaluating the extinguishing performance of domestic and foreign wetting extinguishing agents under these conditions, a reignition was occurred in only when we used water. In addition, the discrimination of extinguishing performance was seen through the temperature distribution according to the time of watering. Based on the results of this experiment, this study is expected to be able to use as a basis on presenting a method of optimized performance evaluation of wetting extinguishing agent.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
• /
• v.29 no.4
• /
• pp.78-84
• /
• 2014

Viscosity agents were added to water to improve extinguishing performance of low pressure water mist suppression system on wood cribs fire, and a small scale wood cribs fire experiment was conducted to measure the extinguishing performance. CMC and agar were used for viscosity agent and as the amount of viscosity agent enlarges, it showed the increase of the viscosity of aqueous solution and the decrease of the fluidity. On wood cribs fire experiment, the extinguishing efficiency was improved with supplemental viscosity agent as it enhanced the adhesive time of aqueous solution on the wood, and therefore expanded the contact time of fire surface. The surface tension of aqueous solution was decreased with the addition of agar which to be assumed as an increase factor of extinguishing efficiency. By the extinguishing experimental result, the most effective extinguishing agent was CMC 0.6 wt.%, with the flame suppression time and the extinguishing time were reduced by 70s and 93s respectively at this concentration.

• Fire Science and Engineering
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.139-144
• /
• 2010

An experimental study has been carried out to investigate the possibilities of an industrial $N_2$ generator that it replace Halon series as a natural extinguishing system. And this study comparison design standard of gas series extinguishing system with natural extinguishing system. We manufactured simple protected enclosure for analyzing fire-extinguishing performance of the $N_2$ generator. As a $N_2$ gas is exhausted on protected enclosure, a various of Oxygen concentration is measured to analyze fireextinguishing performance experimentally. The results, in case of $100m^3$ protected enclosure and $5m^3$/min $N_2$ flow rate, the Oxygen concentration is decreased below 15% within 3 minutes. And so, the $N_2$ generator make full use of an suffocating extinguishing system.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.15-26
• /
• 2009

This research has so far found out problems including the second damage of extinguishant and the short time of emission when using the existing dry chemical extinguisher and gas type extinguisher, and impossibility of constant extinguishing due to the inability of recharge at the field. To solve such problems, a mobile water mist system was developed and used. However, it is judged that more improved mobile water mist system is necessary because the force of the fire changed diversely and remote villages in mountains or islands where the force of fire extinguishing is short or delayed, require high capacity of fire extinguishing. Therefore a new equipment was developed and tested focusing on the improvement of extinguishing capacity and the performance of extinguishing was found out to be improved, compared to the existing mobile water mist system. It also showed a superior extinguishing capacity to dry chemical extinguisher or gas type extinguisher. Afterward an additional research is required of simplification of equipment, price cutting and the development of additive to enable high performance even with just small extinguishant.

• Fire Science and Engineering
• /
• v.26 no.6
• /
• pp.15-23
• /
• 2012

Indirect Test Method is often used instead of direct test method in test method for extinguishing performance of $CO_2$ extinguishing facility because of high cost, environment problems and difficulties of procedure. But in the danger facilities for a unit of nation, such as a petrochemical plant, a nuclear power plant, or etc. is better to verify the performance of the extinguishment through direct discharge test. In $CO_2$ extinguishing system for total flooding system installed in dangerous facilities in Korea, each protected area in surface fire and deep-seated fire had selected and verified of extinguishing performance of $CO_2$ extinguishing facilities. To get recognized as extinguishing performance, discharged $CO_2$ concentration to protected area should be equivalence with design concentration standards (NFSC and NFPA). The Design Concentration means that $CO_2$ extinguishing agent is considerate of concentration for percentage of allowance (20 %) from extinguishing concentration which available to control of flame. As test result, surface fire and deep seated fire in protected area is obtained $CO_2$ design concentration and maintained design concentration more than 20 minutes as deep-seated fire. Through this study, we introduced direct discharging test method and decision method. And furthermore, especially in the dangerous facilities as a unit of Nation, we suggested necessity about reliability of extinguishing facilities to use direct test method.