SYMPOSIA PAPER Published: 01 January 1992
STP19200S

Instrumented Mannequin Evaluation of Thermal Protective Clothing

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An instrumented mannequin has been constructed for testing the thermal protective qualities of garments when subjected to short duration flash fires. To measure the rate of heat transfer to the mannequin surface 110 skin simulant sensors are used. The flash fires are produced with propane diffusion flames. A computer controlled data acquisition system is used to run the experiment, record and store the data, calculate the extent and nature of skin damage and display the results. The sampling rate of the system is 800 Hz. The heat fluxes used in the study were varied from 67 kW/m2 to 84 kW/m2 (1.6 cal/cm2· s to 2 cal/cm2· s), while burn durations were limited to 3 and 4 seconds.

Six different fibre/fire retardant/fabric weight combinations were tested. The results show that increasing the fabric weight for a particular fibre reduces the extent of skin burning. However some materials are more effective than others so that a general correlation of this form does not hold. Increasing the heat flux level and duration increased the predicted amount of skin burning with all the garments tested. There was a good correlation with TPP results at the low heat fluxes and durations, but not at the high values for each.

Author Information

Dale, JD
Crown, EM
Ackerman, MY
Leung, E
Rigakis, KB
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Details
Developed by Committee: F23
Pages: 717–733
DOI: 10.1520/STP19200S
ISBN-EB: 978-0-8031-5194-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-8031-1430-2