This report describes water mist and water spray system tests inside a simulated machinery space. The tests were conducted inside a compartment measuring 8,0 m by 12,5 m with a ceiling height of 5,0 m. The corresponding volume was 500 m3. The walls and the ceiling were constructed from steel plates. The test compartment replicates an intermediate size machinery space compartment onboard a ship. Either diesel oil or heptane pool fires were used as the fire source. The fires had nominal heat release rates of 500 kW, 1 MW and 2 MW, respectively and were either fully exposed to the water spray or completely shielded by a horizontal obstruction steel plate measuring 2 m by 2 m. Three different systems were tested; (1) a water spray system flowing 500 L/min at 2 bar (this system was designed according to the SOLAS convention), (2) a low-pressure system flowing 97 L/min at 12 bar and (3) a high-pressure system flowing 60 L/min at 70 bar. In addition to the tests using these three systems, free burn tests were conducted inside the compartment. This report contains a description of the test set-up, its instrumentation, the fire test procedures and a limited presentation of the results. A more thorough analysis of the test results will be made in subsequent reports, articles and papers.

Radiative heat transfer to a solid is a key mechanism in fire dynamics, and in-depth absorption is especially of importance for translucent fuels. The sample-heater interaction for radiative heat transfer is experimentally investigated in this study with two different heaters (electric resistance and tungsten lamp) using clear PolyMethylMethAcrylate (PMMA) samples from two different formulations (Plexiglass and Lucite). First, the significant effects of the heater type and operating temperature on the radiative heat transfer are revealed with broadband measurements of transmittance on samples of different thicknesses. Then, the attenuation coefficient in Beer-Lambert's law has been calculated from detailed spectral measurements over the full wavelength range encountered in real fires. The measurements present large spectral heterogeneity. These experimental results and calculation of in-depth absorption are used to explain the reason behind the apparent variation of the fuel absorbance with the sample thickness observed in past studies. The measurement of the spectral intensity emitted by the heaters verifies that the common assumption of blackbody behavior is correct for the electric resistance, whereas the tungsten lamp does not even behave as a greybody. This investigation proofs the necessity of a multi-band radiation model to calculate accurately the fire radiative heat transfer which affects directly the in-depth temperature profiles and hence the pyrolysis process for translucent fuel.