Evaluating Storage Protection Under Sloped Ceilings

T13
Evaluating Storage Protection Under Sloped Ceilings
Andre Marshall, Custom Spray Solutions Prateep Chatterjee, FM Global

In the event of a fire, a sloped ceiling may alter ceiling smoke transport dynamics from those expected in a conventional flat ceiling configuration, modifying sprinkler activation behavior. The sloped ceiling configuration may also alter sprinkler spray patterns. It is not clear to what extent these modified dynamics may affect the balance of commodity, room, and sprinkler system characteristics needed for acceptable storage protection performance. This presentation will include results of the FPRF Phase 1 project 'Protection of Storage Under Sloped Ceilings' which include a review of current storage configurations performed by Custom Spray Solutions (CSS) and a numerical modeling study of ceiling slope effects on suppression performance performed by FM Global using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code FireFOAM. These results are used to provide protection research recommendations and full-scale tests to be conducted in Phase 2. The NFPA 13 technical committee will use these findings to develop new protection requirements and guidance.

Presented by:

Andre Marshall, Custom Spray Solutions
Dr. Andr� Marshall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering, Director of the Fire Testing and Evaluation Center at the University of Maryland, and Principal and Co-Founder of a technology start-up, Custom Spray Solutions. His research focuses on characterizing turbulent flow transport in fires. Dr.Marshall received the prestigious NSF Presidential Early CAREER Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2007 for his fire suppression research. The PECASE award is the highest honor bestowed by the US government on scientists and engineers in the early stages of their research careers. Dr. Marshall's research team is currently working on the fire suppression problem with Fortune 500 companies such as FM Global and United Technologies.

Prateep Chatterjee, FM Global
Prateep Chatterjee, PhD, is Senior Lead Research Scientist in the Fire Hazards and Protection Area of Research and Engineering at FM Global. His primary research interest areas are soot and radiation modeling in fires and computational fluid dynamics of reacting flows and heat transfer. He is also involved in research in the general flammability area and supports staff engineering with problem solving research. Prateep received a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is a member of NFPA, SFPE, IAFSS, and the Combustion Institute.