Fire modeling of an emerging fire suppression system

Self-contained fire extinguishers are a robust, reliable and minimally invasive means of fire suppression for gloveboxes. Test methodology has been developed (experiments and computations) to predict fire induced tube wall failure in small scale compartments such as gloveboxes. A small scale test apparatus has been developed to characterize tube wall temperature and breakage properties. Computational tools have been used to better understand experiments. The heat release rate and heat flux have been accurately predicted because the forward predicted temperatures closely matched the experimentally measured values. Data generated from computational modeling of fire phenomena helps to identify the limitations of self-contained fire extinguishers.