Ignition of Wood-based Materials by Thermal Radiation

Ignition is the initial stage of burning the materials. Consequent flame spread over the materials, heat release rate, fire spread across the rooms, and other issues for building fires all depend on that. Ignition of cellulose materials is commonly classified as smoldering or glowing ignition (self-heating ignition) and flaming ignition including piloted and spontaneous ignition. Numerous studies on this topic were reported in the literature. A review on ignition of wood will be reported in this paper. Ignition temperature, critical mass flux of volatiles, time to ignition, critical heat flux and critical heat release were measured experimentally and applied as key ignition criteria for theoretical analysis. Quantitative study on modeling smoldering ignition of cellulosic materials is not yet well understood. As experimental data is inadequate, this part is only briefly discussed. Models of flaming ignition were well developed from those well validating experimental data. However, most of the flaming ignition models of wood were only on the solid phase. Gas phase phenomena during ignition should be further examined for developing flaming ignition models.