From our Norfolk & Suffolk branch
Join us for this free, online webinar from our Norfolk and Suffolk branch discussing an assessment of firefighter-deployed smoke blocking curtains.
This event is presented by Dan Selby BEng (Hons) AIFireE MIFSM, Station Manager, Cheshire Fire & Rescue Service. With a background spanning fire protection, enforcement, fire investigation and incident command, Dan will present a 45-50 minute assessment of smoke blocking curtains before answering questions in a 10-15 minute Q&A session.
Overview
Portable fabric smoke curtains are increasingly carried by fire and rescue services and deployed by firefighters to hold back smoke spread during operations, yet their performance has rested largely on assumption rather than quantified evidence. This session presents the findings of a study combining a full-scale compartment burn with a calibrated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to measure how effectively a firefighter-deployed curtain blocks smoke movement along a corridor.
The talk covers the experimental set-up and instrumentation, the optical measurements used to quantify smoke obscuration and visibility, and the approach taken to calibrate the CFD model against the burn data so that the findings are transferable beyond the single test geometry. It sets out what the results show about curtain performance, the practical and modelling limitations encountered, and what the study contributes as, to the author's knowledge, the first full-scale quantitative experimental study of firefighter-deployed portable fabric smoke curtains.