Can water mist systems wash out smoke?
Experiences from fire tests conducted in tunnels and corridors, and from smoke scrubbing installations have shown that water mist, at the right conditions, are able to scrub soot particles from smoke. The efficiency of this performance depends very much on flux density and droplet size of the water mist system and on the time the smoke particles stay within the water mist atmosphere. Therefore, the smoke-scrubbing capability cannot be generalized and has to be evaluated case-by case. It is also important to realize that water mist is not able to scrub out non-water soluble gases like carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide(CO2). Some toxic gases, however, e.g. hydrogen chloride (HCL) are water soluble and would be scrubbed out to a certain degree.
