- Author
- Cooper, J. | Yung, D.
- Title
- Fire Growth Model for Apartment Buildings.
- Coporate
- National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario
- Report
- Internal Report No. 734, January 1997, 37 p.
- Keywords
- apartments | fire growth | equations | validation | furniture | walls | fire behavior
- Abstract
- A detailed description of the existing National Research Council of Canada's (NRC) one-zone fire growth is presented. Several changes to the model are recommended based on recent experimental observations. The model was compared to the results of three full-scale fire tests performed with different loadings of flexible polyurethane foam in an ASTM/ISO standard room. An accurate prediction of the experimental mass loss rate was found to have the greatest importance in predicting overall fire behavior. The experimental mass loss rate was observed to increase more quickly than the predicted rate and to decay more slowly as a function of fuel depeltion. These differences were attributed, respectively, to an underprediction of the flame spread rate on the fuel by the model, and to an (assumed) tendency of polyurethane foams to resist oxygen penetration and flame spread as burning progresses. For flashover fires, the inability of the one-zone model to distinguish between the hot ceiling layer and the rest of the compartment resulted in an underprediction of the external heat flux to the fuel, wheich further impeded the growth of the model fire. Increasing the flame spread rate by a factor of 2.3, introducing an appropriate decay function for the mass loss rate, and incorporating a hot layer temperature in the estimation of the heat flux to the fuel resulted in excellent predictions of the mass loss rate as well as all the other experimental results, demonstrating the suitability of the proposed modelling.