Henry Persson: What can Approvals do for You?
Published: 10 November, 2009
The presentation will cover an overview and discussion of existing foam standards but also consider possibilities for a more fundamental evaluation of foams in the future. A large number of fire fighting foam standards are presently available worldwide which foam manufacturers need to fulfil in order to sell their products on the international market. Some of these standards represent generic use in some way while others are intended to represent a specific use or application. An important question is whether these standards are representative of the intended use, i.e., does the test method and the stipulated requirements ensure that the foam that performs best according to the standard test also guarantees best performance in a real fire situation?
When developing future foam concentrates with better performance than existing foams, there is a pressing need for a more fundamental understanding of the properties of these foams and the extinguishing process itself. A first attempt at such an evaluation was made in the EC Project FOAMSPEX where a model was developed to calculate the foam spread over a large burning fuel surface using fundamental properties of the foam as input data. A brief review of this project will be made and some results and recommendations presented.
About the speaker
Henry Persson is a mechanical engineer working at the fire laboratory at SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, mainly with testing and research in the area of fire extinguishing media, extinguishing systems and industrial fire fighting. He has been working at SP since 1979 and is actively participating in the International and European standardisation work as the principal Swedish expert. The ISO group for fire fighting foams, ISO TC21/SC6/WG4, was chaired by Mr Persson for several years. Mr Persson was the project leader at SP for the EC foam research project FOAMSPEX.
