Effect of instrument response time on heat release rate measurements

A linear hereditary integral technique provides simple analytic solutions for deconvoluting thermopile and oxygen consumption data to remove the effect of instrument response time on peak and integrated heat release rate values. A comparison of corrected and uncorrected thermopile and oxygen sensor data obtained on an Ohio State University (OSU) apparatus for various materials indicates that significant errors in peak and integrated heat release rate can result from delayed instrument response to repidly changing heat flows. However, correcting for temporal effects alone using this procedure does not account for differences between heat release rate values obtained by thermopile and oxygen consumption methods.