Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Current design for fire protection subjects an individual structural element to a standard temperature profile that is meant to ensure the element's load-carrying capacity for a predetermined period of time during a fire. While this approach satisfies the structural component's fire resistance requirement, it does not provide an understanding of the behavior of the structure in a fire. To fully understand a structure's behavior in a fire, a full-scale fire experiment is necessary. Scaled experiments offer an economical alternative to full-scale fire experiments. This paper discusses a method for scaling a compartment fire by using the laws of similitude. The profiles of hot gas temperature versus time in such a reduced-scale compartment will be similar to those in a full-scale compartment, which is a necessary condition for conducting reduced-scale structural fire testing. Experimental verification at two different scales are performed to show the validity of the proposed approach. It has been shown that the method can be applied to simulate the fire loading on the structure of the World Trade Center tower on 11 September, 2001.

Keywords

scaled fire testing scale modeling compartment fire similitude structural test.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Fema, `` World Trade Center Building Performance Study : Data Collection, Preliminary Observations, and Recommendations,'' In: McAllister, T. ed., FEMA 403 , Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C., 2002.

ASTM E 119, Standard Test Methods for Fire Tests of Building Construction and Materials, ASTM International, West Conshohocken, PA, USA, 2006.

Issen, L. , ``Scaled Models in Fire Research on Concrete Structures,'' Journal of the PCA Research and Development Laboratories, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1966, pp. 10-26.

O'Connor, D.J. , Silcock, G.W.H. and Morris, B. , ``Furnace Heat Transfer Processes Applied to a Strategy for the Fire Testing of Reduced Scale Structural Models,'' Fire Safety Journal, Vol. 27, 1996 , pp. 1-22.

Quintiere, J.G. , Fundamentals of Fire Phenomena, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. , 2006.

Gross, A.F. and Robertson, D. , ``Experimental Fires in Enclosures,'' In: 10th International Symposium on Combustion, The Combustion Institute , 1965, pp. 931-942.

Heskestad, G. , ``Modeling of Enclosure Fires,'' Journal of Fire and Flammability, Vol. 6, No. 3, 1975, pp. 253-273.

Croce, P.A. , Modeling of Vented Enclosure Fire Part 1 . Quasi-Steady Wood-Crib Source Fire, Technical Report, Norwood, MA, USA, Factory Mutual Research Corporation , 1978 .

Croce, P.A. and Xin, Y. , ``Scale Modeling of Quasi-steady Wood Crib Fires in Enclosures,'' Fire Safety Journal, Vol. 40, 2005 , pp. 245-266.

10.

Perricone, J.A. , Scale Modeling of the Transient Behavior of Wood Crib Fires in Enclosures, MS Thesis, 2005, University of Maryland .

11.

Harmathy, T.Z. , Properties of Building Materials at Elevated Temperatures, National Research Council of Canada, Division of Building Research, Ottawa, Canada, 1983.

12.

Thomas, P.H. and Heselden, J.M. , C.I.B. International Co-operative Programme on Fully-Developed Fires in Single Compartment: Comprehensive Analysis of Results.

13.

Unifrax Corporation, http://www.unifrax.com

14.

Thermal Ceramics, www.thermalceramics.com

15.

Wang, M. , Chang, P.C. , Quintiere, J.G. and Marshall, A. , ``Scale modeling of the 96th Floor of World Trade Center Tower 1'' , ASCE Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities, Vol. 21, No. 6, 2007.

Scale Modeling of Compartment Fires for Structural Fire Testing

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References