- Author
- Gann, R. G. | Averill, J. D. | Marsh, N. D. | Nyden, M. R.
- Title
- Assessing the Accuracy of a Physical Fire Model for Obtaining Smoke Toxic Potency Data.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Report
- Volume 2,
- Book or Conf
- Interflam 2007. (Interflam '07). International Interflam Conference, 11th Proceedings. Volume 2. September 3-5, 2007, London, England, 1021-1032 p., 2007
- Keywords
- toxicity | smoke | fire models | fire tests | room burns | combustion products | standards | building codes | flashover | couches | carbon monoxide | cables | carbon dioxide | occupants | FT-IR
- Identifiers
- ISO TC92 SC3 documents and work items (as of 4 April, 2007); room-scale fire tests; minimum detection limits using FTIR spectroscopy; yields of combustion products from room-scale fire tests (g/g); limits of importance of undetected toxicants; "sofas" made of upholstered cushions supported by a steel frame; particleboard bookcases with a laminated polyvinyl chloride (PVC) finish; electric power cable in a three-dimensional array of horizontal trays
- Abstract
- A principal component of the engineering of a building is providing for the safety of occupants and responders in the event of a fire. This includes estimation of the time available for people to escape or to find safe refuge within. An accurate, quantitative methodology for this estimation is critical. As noted in a recent analysis by Hall, some 310,000 to 670,000 people in the United States alone are annually exposed to smoke from reported home fires. He further found that: "Roughly half of the deaths and roughly two-thirds of the injuries could be prevented were the times to incapacitating exposures lengthened sufficiently to result in a more favorable outcome." Today's fire safety professionals use diverse and ad hoc approaches to make these estimates, in part due to there being no widely accepted methodology of known accuracy for generating the smoke toxic potency data needed as input. There is a wide range of combustible items used in buildings. It is unrealistic to expect a comprehensive database of human or surrogate animal measurements of the smoke toxicity from real-scale burning of these items. Rather, data are commonly obtained from measurements of the toxic components of the smoke that are generated when test specimens are combusted in a bench-scale physical fire model.