Experimental investigation of foam spread and extinguishment of the large-scale methanol pool fire

A steel channel with the size of 30m×2 m×1.2m has been made to simulate the full surface fire of a 50,000m(3) methanol tank. Several large-scale methanol fire extinguishment experiments have been conducted under different foam application rates and foam concentrations in order to investigate the flow length, flow velocity and fire extinguishing effectiveness of the alcohol-resistant foam. The result showed that the alcohol-resistant aqueous film forming foam (AFFF/AR) and alcohol-resistant fluoro-protein foam (FP/AR) could flow beyond 30m on the burning methanol surface and extinguish the fire successfully even with the foam application rate of 4Lmin(-1)m(-2). Under the same condition, the fire extinguishing performance of AFFF/AR was better than FP/AR, and the flow velocity of AFFF/AR on the burning methanol surface was 0.203ms(-1), while the value of FP/AR was 0.082ms(-1).