Abstract View
Laboratory-Generated Aerosols as Transfer Standards to Characterize Smoke Detector Performance
XIAOLIANG WANG, Judith Chow, John Watson, Marit Meyer, Gary Ruff, David Urban, John Easton, Gordon Berger, Paul Mudgett, Desert Research Institute
Abstract Number: 180
Working Group: Combustion
Abstract
A smoke detector is critical for the early detection of a fire to save lives and avoid fire damage. Due to limited options to extinguish fires, rapid and accurate smoke detection is especially important for space activities. Performance testing of consumer smoke detectors requires specific facilities and experiments with smoldering and flaming emissions from different fuels (e.g., cotton lamp wick, paper, wood, gasoline, and polystyrene). Smoke detectors for use in spacecraft are tested using similar setups with representative fuel materials. To reduce the level of effort required to test smoke detectors and predict performance of future smoke detector designs, this study explored the use of laboratory-generated reference aerosols as transfer standards to evaluate smoke detector performance. Compared to smoke aerosols, reference aerosols can be generated with more precisely controlled chemical composition, size distribution, concentration, and optical properties. Among the three tested reference aerosols, mineral oil particles were reproducibly generated with a Gemini smoke detector tester, dioctyl sebacate (DOS) particles were generated with a wide concentration range and flexible size distributions using an atomizer, while polystyrene latex (PSL) particles were difficult to produce with the high concentrations needed for smoke detector testing. Reference aerosols generated from 1.5%–100% DOS solutions and mineral oil covered the response range of six types of smoke aerosols generated by oxidative pyrolysis of spacecraft-relevant materials. No single reference aerosol can simulate all the relevant spacecraft smoke aerosols and their corresponding detector responses within ±10% error; however, useful relationships between these reference and smoke aerosols were derived from this study.