Citation

Kim IY, Lee C, Li P, Corner BD, Paquette S. Fire Mater. 2002; 26(3): 121-126.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Air gaps entrapped in protective clothing are known as one of the major factors affecting heat transfer through multiple layers of flexible clothing fabrics. The identification and quantification of the air gaps are two aspects of a multidisciplinary research effort directed toward improving the flame/thermal protective performance of the clothing. Today's three-dimensional (3-D) whole body digitizers, which provide accurate representations of the surface of the human body, can be a novel means for visualizing and quantifying the air gaps between the wearer and his clothing. In this paper we discuss how images from a 3-D whole body digitizer are used to determine local and global distributions of air gaps and the quantification of air gap sizes in single and multilayer clothing systems dressed on a thermal manikin. Examples are given that show concordance between air gap distributions and burn patterns obtained from full-scale manikin fire tests. We finish with a discussion of the application of air gap information to bench-scale testing to improve the protective performance of current flame/thermal protective clothing.