A New Method for Quantifying Fire Growth Rates Using Statistical and Empirical Data – Applied to Determine the Effect of Arson
Författare
Summary, in English
overall fire safety level within the building. Generally, a deterministic fire growth rate is used raising the
question whether the resulting design arrives at a reasonable level of safety. A method was developed to
obtain distributions of fire growth rates in specific building types. The new method uses data from two
sources: fire statistics, and fire growth rates on single objects obtained by calorimetry experiments. In
addition, the method was demonstrated by a case study investigating whether the overall fire growth rate is
faster for commercial buildings if arson fires are included than if they are not. The results show that there is
a considerably higher fire growth rate when arson fires are accounted for, e.g. designing for a fast fire
growth rate of 0.047 kW/s2 covers 97% of accidental fires (arson excluded) but only 91% of all fires (arson
included). The results indicate that there is a need to account for arson fires when designing buildings when
the probability of arson is high. The developed method provides means to account for arson in fire safety
engineering, and to further quantify the achieved fire safety level.
Avdelning/ar
Publiceringsår
2014
Språk
Engelska
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
[Host publication title missing]
Länkar
Dokumenttyp
Konferensbidrag
Förlag
International Association of Fire Safety Science
Ämne
- Building Technologies
Nyckelord
- fire growth
- statistics
- building code
- design fire
- fire safety engineering
Conference name
11th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science
Conference date
2014-02-09 - 2014-02-14
Conference place
Christchruch, New Zealand
Status
Published
Forskningsgrupp
- Fire dynamics