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On the Protective Performance of Firefighters’ Garments: Air Gaps Between Fabric Layers

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Abstract

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.

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Abbreviations

c P :

Specific heat

\(\hat{e}_{y}\) :

Unit vector in y-direction

G :

Incident irradiation

h :

Convection heat transfer coefficient

I :

Irradiation intensity

k :

Thermal conductivity

P :

Pre-exponential factor

\(q^{{\prime \prime }}\) :

Heat flux

\(\overset{\lower0.5em\hbox{$\smash{\scriptscriptstyle\rightharpoonup}$}} {r}\) :

Position vector

R :

Universal gas constant

\(\hat{s}\) :

Unit vector

T :

Temperature

t :

Time

y :

Vertical coordinate

\(\varphi\) :

Azimuthal angle

\(\kappa\) :

Absorption coefficient

\(\omega\) :

Blood perfusion rate

\(\rho\) :

Density or reflectivity

\(\varepsilon\) :

Emissivity

\(\gamma\) :

Extinction coefficient

\(\theta\) :

Polar angle

\(\phi\) :

Quantitative coefficient of skin damage

\(\Delta E\) :

Skin activation energy

\(\varOmega\) :

Solid angle

\(\sigma\) :

Stefan-Boltzmann constant

air :

Air gap

amb :

Ambient surroundings

b :

Black body/human blood

cnv :

Heat transfer by convection

cr :

Body core

ep, ds, sc :

Epidermis, dermis, subcutaneous skin layers

exp :

Exposure

fab :

Fabric

g :

Hot gases

lin :

Thermal liner

msr :

Moisture barrier

R :

Heat transfer by radiation

shl :

Outer shell

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mechanical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, Jouf University, Saudi Arabia, P.O. Box 2014, Sakaka, Aljouf, Saudi Arabia

    Ahmed Ghazy

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  1. Ahmed Ghazy
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Correspondence to Ahmed Ghazy.

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Ghazy, A. On the Protective Performance of Firefighters’ Garments: Air Gaps Between Fabric Layers. Fire Technol 56, 821–836 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-019-00905-w

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