Soot yield and heat of combustion

[Swissi]

Hi everyone,

Here in Switzerland the government tells us that for all cases calculated by FDS we have to put a soot yield of 0.04 and a heat of combustion of 25 kJ/g.
I find that these entries are very big. Am I right? 

Where can I find the heat of combustion and soot yield for an office fire?

Thanks a lot, your work is amazing!

[Charlie Thornton]

I don't have a sense of averages. What I consistently hear from the group at NIST is that (for example) pine vs stained pine vs old dry pine will give very different experimental results, even though they are all "pine". There's a thread over at the FDS discussion group that discusses the problem in some detail:

http://groups.google.com/group/fds-smv/browse_thread/thread/a26e6f4f303f2f14/c3d39ebd52ff20b1

They've also got an aging thread that links to some resources for material properties:

http://groups.google.com/group/fds-smv/browse_thread/thread/d03483acf36b675d/9c55191617ea245b

Since you are interested in office fires, you might want to check out the Cook County Administration Building Fire. NIST did a lot of modeling work on that fire and you can find the write-up here:

http://fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/NIST_SP-1021.pdf

[Charlie Thornton]

We've now resurrected the more elaborate material references page that used to be a "page" at the FDS discussion group and posted the content on the PyroSim site.  Here is a link:

http://www.thunderheadeng.com/pyrosim/fds-material-data-references/