Abstract:

At present, there hasn’t a general quantitative index for effective evaluation of thermal protective clothing performance(TPP) internationally. This paper presents a clothing TPP evaluation method based on fabric TPP testing, in which the air layer widths expand to different sizes. The value of the fabric TPP and the air layer under clothing are matched and integrated, leading to the thermal protective clothing TPP performance evaluation. Experimental results show that clothing thermal protective performance increases with the smaller of air gap size; the better the fabric TPP, the better the performance of clothing with the same specification; the new clothing TPP indexes are consistent with flame manikin burn evaluation results, which can also be used in the thermal protective clothing performance evaluation.

Key words: thermal protective performance of fabric, firefighter protective clothing, air gap, flame manikin