Wall and Corner Fire Tests on selected Wood Products

Abstract

As part of a fire growth program to develop and validate a com partment fire model, several bench-scale and full-scale tests were conducted. This paper reports the full-scale wall and corner test results of step 2 of this study. A room fire test following the ASTM proposed standard specifications was used for these full-scale tests. In step 1, we investigated the combination of factors for evaluating wood products in wall and corner fire tests. They were the position of the ignition source, power output from the source, and combination of lining materials. We concluded from the sensitivity study (step 1) that for wall and corner fire tests, a burner output program consisting of 40 kW expo sure for 5 min followed by 160 kW exposure for 5 min was the most informative. In this paper, step 2 of the research program, results from wall and corner tests using six wood materials having different flame spread indices (according to ASTM E 84) are given. The two-step burner setting was confirmed to be better than a constant setting for evaluating wood materials. The relative perfor mance of these materials was in line with their ASTM E 84 flame spread prop erties. Smoke release rates obtained by white-light and laser systems showed excellent agreement. Only rate of heat and smoke release, selected tempera tures, and heat fluxes are reported. The complete reduced data set will be pub lished later.