Concurrent flame spread over vertically oriented paper sheet: The effect of sample thickness

Packing or printing paper made out of cellulose is widely produced and used in daily life. The thickness of thin material affects the burning process significantly. Concurrent flame spread is an effective approach when analyzing and evaluating the fire hazard for combustible materials. Conducting this work will provide further understanding of the flame spread mechanism and reduce fire hazard. It will also enable investigation of the effect of sample thickness on concurrent flame spreading over the thin paper sheets experimentally. Numerically examining concurrent flame spread over thin paper sheet with varied thicknesses is also performed using Direct Numerical Simulation, which can provide more details on flame spread process. Qualitatively, the model predictions agree reasonably with the experiment in terms of the flame contour, burn duration, and flame spread rate. The moving rates of the flame base and pyrolysis front decrease with sample thickness both experimentally and numerically. The relationship between net heat flux, flame standoff distance, and solid burning rate is analyzed, with the burning rate exhibiting a similar trend to that of the net heat flux. A correlation of the flame net heat flux with the normalized distance in the pyrolysis region is also established where the flame heat flux displays a decay trend with the normalized space.