Spread rate of peat smouldering on laboratory scale experiment with reactors of different sizes.

Knowledge of the smoldering peat propagation is important to study the correlation of each peat characteristic's fire hazard potential level by peat fires in the field. The experiment was conducted at a laboratory scale to looks at the effect of reactor sizes using reactors of 10×10×10 cm and 40×40×20 cm size to study the heat transfer phenomena that occur. The samples used were from Rokan Hilir (ROHIL) and Palangkaraya (PKY). The results found that testing using a 10×10×10 cm reactor for ROHIL peat did not propagate successfully, while PKY peat showed very high spread rate values because the heat accumulated in a narrow space. The smoldering spread rate can be identified using the 40×40×20 cm reactor, 1.47 cm/h for ROHIL peat, and 5.13 cm/h for PKY peat. The small reactor cannot be used to observe the spread rate of peat smouldering, which is more than 5 cm/hour, so an appropriate observation distance is needed to study peat smouldering combustion behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]