Fig. 1 shows typical responses of the commonly used fire detectors (optical light
scattering: O-Detector, and ionization detectors: I-Detector) by TF2 and cigarettesmoke
test. The capture starting times of the experiments were 60 and 30 s,
respectively. An alarm will be generated by exceeding the 1.0 threshold. Even by
exceeding the threshold over 18 s the signal remains constant by 1.0.
The represented courses of the O- and I-Detectors show that a false alarm occurs
during the cigarette-smoke test (Fig. 2). Both detectors showed quite a late response
in the case of TF2. The tests described in Tables 1 and 2 also support the statistic
mentioned above [2]. This is due to the fact that the current detectors are designed to
only detect smoke particles, in special cases in combination with temperature rise.
Consequently, it is necessary to characterize fires in order to determine further
important fire parameters.