ABSTRACT
It is of considerable importance to the fire protection engineer to be able to roughly predict the hot gas temperature in a fire compartment. This knowledge can be used to assess when hazardous conditions for humans will occur, when flashover may occur, when structural elements are in danger of collapsing, and the thermal feedback to fuel sources or other objects. Any prediction of the hot gas temperature in a compartment fire must be based on the conservation of energy and mass; this usually leads to a number of differential equations that can be solved numerically to predict the temperature. By simplifying the energy and mass balances, one can arrive at fairly simple analytical equations that can predict the hot gas temperature for a number of compartment fire scenarios. These scenarios usually require that the fire is well ventilated, i.e., that there is an opening to the outside. This chapter reviews a number of methods that have been developed for predicting temperatures in both pre-and post-flashover phases of well-ventilated compartment fires.
