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This paper has studied the influence of ambient pressure and oxygen content on spontaneous ignition of wood by conducting contrastive experiments with wood slab exposed to high temperature radiation at two different altitudes. The measurement of mass loss, time to ignition, and surface temperature of wood are carried out. Results show that mass loss rate of wood at high altitudes (3650 m) is higher than the one at low altitudes (50 m), while ignition delay time of the sample at high altitude is shorter. The surface temperatures at the time of ignition in the two different places are both close to each other, which indicates that the pressure did not affects the ignition temperature. The theoretical analysis on the phenomenon of different ignition behavior of wood in these two altitude environments has been presented.

The ignitability of solid combustibles by a radiation source has been investigated experimentally as a function of distance between the solid and the source, for heating with a uniform incident heat flux. Unlike piloted ignition, the critical incident heat flux for autoignition increases with the increase of radiant distance, which is a result that has not been reported before. It is found that the generation rate of combustible pyrolysis volatiles is a necessary but not sufficient condition for autoignition. By two dimensionless parameters, it is clearly indicated that the occurrence of autoignition needs both sufficient gas-phase temperature and sufficient concentration of combustible pyrolysis volatiles simultaneously, especially for the larger radiant heating distance condition which is also closer to realistic fire conditions.