The aim of study intends to investigate the physiological response wearing fire chemical protective clothing and to provide the basic data for the safety of firefighter. The results of the study are as follows; After firefighters(n=10; age 31.2) performed workload of 9 METs(6 km/h, 10%) in WBGT 20

Despite advancements in the development of synthetic fibers and materials that provide better insulation, fire burn injuries remain a significant issue. To ensure adequate protection, clothing and equipment must be selected on the basis of performance. There are different standards like ISO standards applicable to each of the various types of clothing used by fire fighters. But, in most cases, the tests are performed in the conditions of high heat flux exposure, the clothing material can be destroyed easily. Thus the effective way to investigate the protective performance for the low (radiant) heat flux conditions should be needed. Therefore improved RPP (Radiant Protective Performance) test method based on the onset of pain burn injury was suggested. Experiments were performed to verify the proposed method with current protective clothing for fire fighters and the transient heat transfer characteristics were identified, also. Moreover, several protective performance indices were acquired from experimental results to analyze their relations.

To ensure adequate protection from the risk of burns, fire fighter's turnout has a composite of more than three components and air gaps between layers of materials. During the flame exposure, radiation and convection heat transfer occurs in the air gap, thus the air gap acts as a thermal resistance with non-linear characteristics. Therefore, in this study, the experiments were performed to identify the effect of various air gap width (0~7 mm) on the thermal protective performance of fire fighter's clothing. The temperatures on each layer and RPP (Radiant Protective Performance, the most effective index representing the thermal protective performance) were measured with various incident radiant heat fluxes. The temperature at the rear surface of the garment decreased and RPP increased with increasing air gap width because the thermal resistance increased. Especially, it could be found that RPP value and air gap width has almost linear relation for the constant incident heat flux conditions. Thus relatively simple RPP predictive equation was suggested for various incident heat flux and air gap conditions.