• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.7-12
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• 2007

The search for a new fire-extinguishing agent with all the desirable properties of halon 1301 has not been successful. To study binary gaseous extinguishing agents instead, one has to determine the extinguishing concentrations for several compositions of a given chemical in an inert gas. This process is expensive and time consuming. The fire suppression efficiencies of gas mixtures of HFC 125 and HFC 227ea with nitrogen as total flooding agents were studied by cup burner method. It was shown that addition of small amounts of those extinguishants to nitrogen can enhance the suppression effectiveness of the inert gas. As expected, the degree of synergism was highest at low concentrations of the chemical. For each binary system, extinguishing concentrations of the pure compounds and one binary data were used to predict the extinguishing concentrations for the entire range of binary composition. The predicted values were very close to experimental data.