Boeing Commercial Airplane Company

The data reported herein reflect some of the flammability properties of interior materials used in wide body transports. The date types presented are those needed to support an analytical model of a fuselage fire

Irwin A. Benjamin

The objective of this discussion is to present background and other technical data that will help in suggesting criteria to be used in conjunction with the Flooring Radiant Panel Test to determine the potential contribution to fire growth of floor covering system for use in corridors and exit ways.

Joe C. Spurgeon

Thirteen aircraft interior materials have been tested in order to compare the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) smoke chamber and the microcombustion tube furnace as methods for generating toxic combustion gases. The microcombustion tube furnace ranked nitrogen- and chloride-containing test materials of known composition according to the expected order based upon HCN and HCI concentrations. The nitrogencontaining test materials were not ranked in the expected order by measuring peak gas concentrations in the NBS smoke chamber. Several methods of sampling combustion gases from the NBS smoke chamber have been investigated in an attempt to maximize sample recovery. These methods include colorimetric detector tubes, bag sampling, impinger sampling, and syringe sampling. In general, syringe sampling resulted in the best sample recoveries of the methods tested in this study.

Animal toxicity tests were conducted for nine aircraft interior materials using Sprague-Dawley rats. A relative toxicity ranking of these predominantly nitrogencontaining materials has been determined by exposing the test animals to the combustion products obtained by decomposing the materials in a combustion tube furnace. A preliminary correlation of animal toxicity data with measured gas concentrations indicates that a possible relationship exists between times-to-incapacitation and hydrogen cyanide concentrations produced by the test -materials. The coefficient of correlation is 0.93.

John A. Parker

A general approach for selecting polymers to increase fire safety in aircraft is described. It is shown that polymer flammability and thermal protection capability are related to the molecular structure of the polymer and it’s there chemical properties. These criteria are used to develop advanced fire resistant materials that can achieve increased survivability in both post-crash and in-flight fires. The degree of fire hardening of materials depends greatly on the available heat load and fire threat present. It will be shown that improvements in fire safety can be achieved by the use of polymers processing certain basic thermochemcial parameters such as high chard yield.

C.E. Polymeropoulos

A mathematical model was developed, which is capable of predicting the burning velocity in polydisperse air-fuel sprays given the initial conditions of the liquid and gas phases. The analytical predictions were tested against previous experimental data, and the agreement was satisfactory.

The burning velocity in polydisperse kerosene-air sprays was measured at constant air-fuel ratio, and for various degrees of atomization of the spray in order to further check the predictions of the mathematical model. The results were also in good agreement with the analytical predictions.