This news article is reproduced from a blog post that originally appeared in the NIST TAKING MEASURE Just a Standard Blog on December 16th, 2020.
By: Matthew Bundy
Credit: FCD/NIST
Burning plastic cart carrying a fax machine, a laptop computer and a 3-ring binder.
Several centuries ago, scientists discovered oxygen while experimenting with combustion and flames. One scientist called it “fire air.” Today, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), we continue to measure oxygen to study the behavior of fires. The NIST National Fire Research Laboratory (NFRL) has four progressively larger canopy hoods that are used to research the behavior of fires. The hoods, like massive lungs, suck in fresh air to give life to the fire under our watchful eyes. We carefully document these unique experiments using multiple cameras and up to several hundred measurement sensors. The hoods’ exhaust enters a series of long metal ducts where the gases and particles are carefully measured before they are scrubbed clean and returned to the outside.
The size of a fire, quantified as the heat release rate, is measured in watts. There are many ways to determine fire size, but one versatile and accurate method, pioneered at NIST in the 1970s, is to capture all the smoke from a fire and measure the amount of oxygen the fire consumes. This method is based on the observation that, for a wide range of combustible materials, the thermal energy produced by a fire is proportional to the mass of oxygen it consumes. The “oxygen cons ..
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