Municipal firefighters count on their protective garments to avoid skin burns caused by thermal and flame exposures. Typical firefighting garment consists of three layers of different fire-resistant fabrics named as outer shell, moisture barrier and thermal liner. This paper employed a numerical heat transfer model for firefighters’ garments, which paid more attention to modeling air gaps bounded between garment’s layers. The paper explored and compared the influences of air gaps bounded between garment’s layers on its protective performance. Specifically, the paper investigated the effect of a variation in the air gaps between the garment layers from 1 mm to 6 mm, a variation in the backside emissivity of the outer shell and moisture barrier layers from 0.9 to 0.1 and a variation in their typical thicknesses from 50% to 200% on the protective performance of garment. The results showed that increasing the width of the gap between the moisture barrier and the thermal liner, reducing the outer shell backside emissivity and increasing the moisture barrier thickness improves the protective performance of firefighters’ garments more than does increasing the width of the gap between the moisture barrier and outer shell, reducing the moisture barrier backside emissivity and increasing the outer shell thickness, respectively.

中文翻译：

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关于消防员服装的防护性能：织物层之间的空气间隙

市政消防员依靠他们的防护服来避免因热和火焰暴露引起的皮肤灼伤。典型的消防服由三层不同的防火织物组成，分别称为外壳、防潮层和热衬里。本文采用了消防员服装的数值传热模型，该模型更注重对服装层之间的空气间隙进行建模。该论文探讨并比较了服装各层之间的空气间隙对其防护性能的影响。具体而言，该论文研究了服装层之间的气隙从 1 毫米变化到 6 毫米、外壳和防潮层的背面发射率从 0.9 变化到 0 的影响。1 以及它们的典型厚度变化从 50% 到 200% 对服装的保护性能。结果表明，增加防潮层与热衬层之间的间隙宽度、降低外壳背面辐射率和增加防潮层厚度对消防员服装的防护性能的提高大于增加防潮层之间的间隙宽度。防潮层和外壳，分别降低防潮层背面发射率和增加外壳厚度。