New Approaches to Evaluate the Performance of Firefighter Protective Clothing Materials

Abstract

This paper presents new proposals in the evaluation and determination of the optimum materials suitable for use in the design and development of firefighter protective clothing by simultaneously addressing the conflicting factors of thermal protection [heat transfer index (HTI), radiant heat transfer index (RHTI) and thermal threshold index (TTI)] and anti-heat stress [water vapor resistance (WVR) and total heat loss (THL)]. To achieve this, this paper proposes new indices for the materials, two types of “total performance” indices, which are defined as the sum and the product of the competing factors of thermal protection and anti-heat stress. The results showed that the candidate materials of firefighter protective clothing were easily rated when the new indices were applied. Of five candidate materials viz. A, B, B1, B2 and C, the B sample, with values for HTI24 = 13.2 ± 0.2 s, RHTI24 = 18.0 ± 0.8 s, TTI = 1132 ± 33 J/m2, WVR = 17.5 ± 0.3 m2 Pa/W and THL = 266.2 ± 4.1 W/m2, was found to exhibit the best total performance. However, the methods proposed to the scientific community in this paper have so far been validated on a limited data set only, and will require further validation by a wider group of researchers and with more samples. Lastly, comments on ISO 11999-3:2015 were also made for the further improvement and development of technical standards.