EFFECT OF CEILING COOLING PANELS ON FIRE SPRINKLER RESPONSE TIME

Cooling panels placed in the ceilings of buildings are an efficient means of promoting thermal comfort, but in a fire scenario, their placement could cool hot gases that are responsible for heating thermally activated fire sprinklers. This extended abstract outlines preliminary results obtained from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of compartment fires in order to assess the effect of the presence of ceiling cooling panels on fire sprinkler responsiveness. Several different cases were considered with different fire growth ramp rates, ventilation configurations, and panel temperatures. The preliminary results indicate that the presence of the cooling panel has little impact on fire sprinkler activation and the presence of the panel never delayed sprinkler activation by more than 11 seconds.