- Author
- Babrauskas, V.
- Title
- Bench-Scale Methods for Prediction of Full-Scale Fire Behavior of Furnishings and Wall Linings.
- Coporate
- National Bureau of Standards, Gaithersburg, MD
- Sponsor
- Consumer Product Safety Commission, Washington, DC
- Report
- SFPE TR 84-10, 1984, 25 p.
- Keywords
- fire behavior | interior finishes | heat release rate | small scale fire tests | upholstered furniture | cone calorimeters | upholstered furniture | oxygen consumption | fire measurements
- Identifiers
- materials flammability
- Abstract
- A bench-scale test method should accurately rank-order performance. This was the objective of bench-scale tests in the 1960s, however, when a more quantitative performance is being sought, a successful bench-scale test should predict full-scale performance and should give data that are useful in numerical modeling. Fire development in a room involves three basic phenomena: ignition, flame spread, and heat release rate. Of these, the heat release rate tends to be more important than the other two in most common fire scenarios. Heat release rates are difficult to determine accurately by direct, sensible-enthalpy measurements. About eight years ago the concept of oxygen consumption calorimetry was first introduced to simplify heat release measurements. It has recently been used in two test apparatuses developed at the National Bureau of Standards: a furniture calorimeter for conducting full-scale tests, and a cone calorimeter for conducting bench-scale tests. Bench-scale data have now been gathered on upholstered furniture and on wall-lining materials, with corresponding full-scale data available from furniture calorimeter or room fire measurements. In both cases, bench-scale measurements allowed the successful prediction of full-scale data for variables of interest, which were the peak rate of heat release and the time to flashover. Ignition behavior was seen to be important for wall materials, but less so for furniture, while the role of flame spread is still being studied.