Backdraft and Smoke Explosions

Overview 

Smoke explosions and backdrafts are somewhat rare, but are potentially deadly events. Understanding the conditions needed to reliably generate smoke explosions provides insight into the firefighting tactics needed to prevent these overpressure events.

Context

Every year high velocity, overpressure events occur which result in injuries and property damage. In most cases, the underlying cause or even the identification of the phenomena remains unknown after the event. Fundamental knowledge about the combustion environment and the interaction of the fuels is needed to better understand and define smoke explosions and backdrafts.

Objectives

• Understand the relationship of vent size, vent location, and fuel mass loss rate needed to generate a smoke explosion.   
• Scale up the experiments to generate smoke explosions at real scale in order to test prevention and mitigation techniques.