A Heat Transfer Model for Firefighters' Protective Clothing

An accurate and flexible model of heat transfer through firefighter protective clothing has many uses, including investigating the degree of protection, in terms of burn injury and heat stress, of a particular fabric assembly and analyzing cheaply and quickly the expected performance of new or candidate fabric designs or fabric combinations. This paper presents the first stage in developing a heat transfer model for firefighters' protective clothing. The protective fabrics are assumed to be dry, which means no moisture from perspiration, and the fabric temperatures considered are below the point of thermal degradation, such as melting or charring. Many firefighter burns occur even when there is no thermal degradation of their protective gear. A planar geometry of the fabric layers is assumed with one-dimensional heat transfer. The forward-reverse model is used for radiative heat transfer. The accuracy of the model is tested by comparing time-dependent temperatures from both within and on the surface of a typical fabric assembly to those obtained experimentally. Overall, the model performed well, especially inside the garment where the temperature difference between the experiment and the stimulation was within 5°C. The predicted temperature on the outer shell of the garment differed most from experimental values, by much as 24°C. This was probably due to the absence of fabric-specific optical properties, such as transmissivity and reflectivity, used for model input.