| Abstract: | Fire safety engineers, especially those experts writing fire test standards, often have different understandings of the concepts of heat transfer from a fire to a surface by radiation and convection. The concepts are therefore often not very well defined, in e.g. ISO and CEN standards, leading in many cases to confusions, misunderstandings and considerable errors. This paper is an effort, in a very simple way, to make the issue a little clearer, particularly for use in international standardization work. ISO/TC92 and the International FORUM of Fire Research Directors are currently endorsing very important work on procedures to calibrate heat flux meters. The two entities, heat transfer by radiation and convection, may be treated independently. The presentation below is deliberately very short and basic avoiding many phenomena that are not immediately needed in most fire standardization work. Recommendations are reached on how to define and measure heat transfer in fire testing. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
