Abstract
In order to characterize fire merging, pool fires on hollow trays with varying side lengths were burned under quasi-quiescent condition and in a wind tunnel with the wind speed ranging from 0 m/s to 7.5 m/s. Burning rate and flame images were recorded in the whole combustion process. The results show that even though the pool surface area was kept identical for hollow trays of different sizes, the measured burning rates and fire evolutions were found to be significantly different. Besides the five stages identified by previous studies, an extra stage, fire merging, was observed. Fire merging appeared possibly at any of the first four stages and moreover resulted in 50-100% increases of the fire burning rates and heights in the present tests. The tests in wind tunnel suggested that, as the wind speed ranges from 0 m/s to 2 m/s, the burning rates decrease. However with further increase of the wind speed from 2 m/s to 7.5 m/s, the burning rate was found to increase for smaller hollow trays while it remains almost constant for larger hollow trays. Two empirical correlations are presented to predict critical burning rate of fire merging on the hollow tray. The predictions were found to be in reasonably good agreement with the measurements. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.