A fire burning in an enclosure with restricted ventilation will result in the accumulation of a layer of warm products of combustion mixed with entrained air adjacent to the ceiling. For many conditions, the depth of this layer will extend to occupy a significant fraction of the volume of the room. Eventually, the interface between this vitiated ceiling layer and the uncontaminated environment below will position itself so that a large portion of the combustion processes occur in this vitiated layer. A description is given here of experimental work concerning the rates of formation of product species and heat release in a turbulent, buoyant natural gas diffusion flame burning in this two-layered configuration. The enclosure was modeled by placing a hood above a burner so that it accumulated the plume gases, and the unsteady development of the ceiling layer was modeled by the direct addition of air into the upper portion of the hood. Measurements of the composition of these gases allowed the computation of stoichiometries and heat release rates. These investigations showed that the species produced in the flame depend primarily on the stoichiometry of the gases present in the ceiling layer and weakly on the temperature of the layer, but are independent of the fuel-air ratio of the mass transported into the layer by the plume. Heat release rates in the fires were compared to a theoretical limit based on a stoichiometric reaction of fuel and air with excess components left unchanged by the combustion
