Johan Sjöström

Using plate thermometer measurements to calculate incident heat radiation

The plate thermometer is a device used mainly to measure temperatures in fire resistance tests according to ISO 834-1 and EN 1363-1 and to measure the so-called adiabatic surface temperature. However, it can also be used to measure incident radiant heat flux ( q · ″ inc ) as a simpler, more robust and less-expensive alternative to water-cooled heat flux meters. The accuracy of the measured q · ″ inc is subject to simplifications in the heat transfer analysis model and uncertainties of parameters such as convective heat transfer coefficients, emissivities and ambient gas temperatures. This study investigates the accuracy of the model itself, isolated from the uncertainties of the physical surrounding, by comparing a simple one-dimensional model to the results of finite element modelling. The so-obtained model includes a heat transfer coefficient due to heat losses of the plate thermometer, found to be K PT = 8 W/m2 K and a heat storage lumped heat capacity C PT = 4200 J/m2 K for an ISO/EN standard plate thermometer. The model is also compared to real field experiments.

Large Scale Test on a Steel Column Exposed to Localized Fire

A localized fire is a fire which in a compartment is unlikely to reach flash-over and uniform temperature distribution. Designing for localized fires is generally more difficult than for flash-over compartment fires because of the complexity of the problem. There is also a lack of experimental data. We report here on a full scale test series on a steel column exposed to localized fires. The setup is a 6 meters tall hollow circular column, ϕ = 200 mm with a steel thickness of 10 mm. The unloaded column was hanging centrally above different pool fires. Temperatures of gas and steel were measured by thermocouples, and adiabatic surface temperatures at the steel surface were measured by plate thermometers of various designs. The results are compared with estimates based on Eurocode 1991-1-2 which in all cases studied overestimate the thermal impact for this setup. The input from plate thermometers was used to compute the steel temperatures using finite element methods. Excellent agreement was found if the rad...

Experimental and Numerical Characterization of an Electrically Propelled Vehicles Battery Casing Including Battery Module

This paper demonstrates the possibility to predict a battery systems performance in a fire resistance test according to the new amendment of United Nations Regulation No. 100 “Uniform Provisions Concerning the Approval of Vehicles with Regard to Specific Requirements for the Electric Power Train” (R100) based on careful measurements of the physical properties of the casing material, as well as modeling of the battery modules and computer simulations. The methodology of the work consists of estimating the heat transfer coefficients by using a gasoline pool fire model in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software FireDynamicsSimulator (FDS), followed by finite-element (FE) calculations of the temperatures in the battery