Pyrolysis model for predicting the fire behavior of flexible polyurethane foam

Numerical simulations capable of predicting the behavior of fire in the built environment are of increasing importance in environment design and safety analysis. The study of polyether polyurethane foam (PUF) is important as it is one of the most abundant materials present in the built environment and poses significant risk of fire and toxic gas. Several attempts to develop pyrolysis models for PUF have been made over the past decade with limited accuracy in replicating experimental result. Observations of PUF decomposition has led to a proposed model describing its kinetics, thermo-physical properties and fuel representation in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) environment. The proposed model describes the physical observations and addresses many of the limitations of previous models. The model is validated with an array cone calorimeter experiments on different size specimens for two types of PUF. The purpose of this paper is to further improve the PUF pyrolysis model so that it can be applied in larger simulations of varying geometrical fuel arrangements.