Abstract
Flame spread behavior over electric wire coated polyethylene (PE) in low pressure is studied experimentally. The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between consumption rate of melting PE and ambient pressure. The ambient gas composition is fixed to the same as air and total pressure is set to sub-atmospheric range (30〜100 kPa). Dynamic behavior of molten PE under various conditions is precisely observed/recorded in order to analyze the growth rate of molten PE and increment of spread rate in time with various types of wires. It turns out that the growth rates in the molten PE of NiCr and Fe wires are larger than that of Cu wire. PE consumption rate of NiCr and Fe wires are weakly depended to pressure, on the other hand, that of Cu wire obviously decreases as the decrease in pressure. Since our results show that the time-depended behavior of molten phase is strongly related to the formation/consumption rate of molten matter and they are closely related to the flame behavior as well, precise modeling of molten layer is necessary to predict the time-depended character of wire combustion.
