Many fire models have been proposed to investigate structural response to fire, where fire is considered as a structural “load” and the structural response determines the “resistance” offered by the structure. Where the term “resistance” is used with its physical meaning and is not restrained by its standard application. Over the course of time, fire models have evolved from simply using the highest

For structural steel components protected by spray-applied fire-resistive materials (SFRMs), variations in the thermal properties and thickness of SFRM may influence steel temperatures during fires. This paper presents a sensitivity analysis of the influence of assumed thermal properties and thickness of SFRM on predicted steel temperatures in fire. For this purpose, material test data in the literature

This paper investigates the structural response of laminated glass beams under combined fire-exposure and sustained in-plane loading. This is done by means of experimental testing and Finite Element (FE) numerical modelling. Firstly, small-scale (1 m long) laminated glass beams are tested under thermal exposure and in-plane loading on a small fire resistance test furnace. From the test results it can

Boron compounds are effective ingredients, widely used in passive fire protection. In this work, epoxy-based hydrocarbon intumescent coatings, containing one of three boron compounds, zinc borate (ZB), ammonium pentaborate (APB), and boric acid (BA), were compared in thermal insulation performance at UL1709 heating conditions, char morphology, viscoelastic behavior, thermal degradation, and composition

Fires are considered one of the most devastating accidents that could occur within a building. However, existing fire detection systems result in late fire detection or produce a high false alarm rate due to the complex patterns and temporal dynamics found in sensor signals that come from the various types of fires. This paper develops a novel fire detection algorithm that is based on multiple sensors

Water droplets and soot serve as important scattering media during fire suppression. From this standpoint, the present study sought to develop a method to determine the effect of soot smoke on the thermal radiation shielding performance of water mist. The radiative properties of single-diesel and propane soot particles and water droplets covered by soot were evaluated using the Mie scattering theory

Carbon fiber composites are a staple in aircraft manufacturing due to their enhanced physical properties and reduced mass compared to metal alloys. In the event of a mishap where these composites are subject to high heat, such as in a fire, resin char and carbon fibers in composites have been shown to oxidize and smolder. The smolder properties and emissions byproducts of aircraft composites are not

The prevalent use of organic materials in manufacturing is a fire safety concern, and motivates the need for predictive thermal decomposition models. A critical component of predictive modeling is numerical inference of kinetic parameters from bench scale data. Currently, an active area of computational pyrolysis research focuses on identifying efficient, robust methods for optimization. This paper

In this work the discharge process of a fire extinguishing agent through a pipe is studied. Particularly, Halon 1301 is considered, an halocarbon that is introduced in bottles pressurized by nitrogen. Nitrogen dissolves in Halon at high pressure, so the bottle contains a multicomponent liquid. Moreover, the discharge process typically entails phase change leading to three different discharge steps

In order to better interpret the fire-induced pressure variation in air-tight compartment fires, the present paper discusses the energy balance equation starting from a commonly used form, taking into account the mutual influence between compartment pressure and ventilation behavior. The obtained pressure formulation, under certain assumptions, can explain the observed linear relationship between pressure

Focusing on convective heat transfer modelling upward flame spread scenarios, different methods for calculating the convective heat fluxes are explored. These approaches involve: 1) calculating convective heat transfer based on the stagnant film theory; 2) using a simplified approach based on the stagnant film theory; 3) using Nusselt correlations for natural convection; and 4) modelling convection

In this paper, we present an experimental study at laboratory scale of a wind driven fire entering a lateral canyon perpendicular to the main fire spread direction. This study is inspired on a multiple fatalities accident occurred in Armamar (Portugal), in 1985. The laboratory experiments show an eruptive fire behaviour inside the canyon. A rapid increase in the rate of spread and intensity of the

For any construction material, failure during or after the decay phase of a fire is possible, notably due to delayed temperature increase and material properties degradation. As mass timber construction is increasingly proposed for large buildings, there is a need to better understand the susceptibility of timber members to fire decay phases. This paper investigates the resistance to full burnout of

A street-intercept survey was carried out among citizens of the Netherlands in order to gain insight into people's perceptions in regard to various topics linked to fire services. Students conducted questionnaires among 247 respondents (residents over the age of 18 from Dutch municipalities). The various fire services topics in the questionnaire were ‘prioritisation of fire service duties’, ‘response

The safety during prescribed burnings could be achieved by conducting these operations under marginal conditions of fire propagation. This type of fire can or cannot propagate on account of small deviations of the burning conditions, mainly the wind speed, the fuel load, and the fuel moisture-content. In this context, numerical simulations of grassland fires were conducted under marginal conditions

An experimental study with 72 specimens was conducted to determine the effects of various factors on the mechanical behaviours of grouted sleeve connections, including an increase in temperature from 20 °C to 600 °C, the loading regime (uniaxial tensile loading or cyclic loading), and the grout compressive strength (83.1–91.1 MPa). After the specimens were exposed to elevated temperatures of up to

The individual and combined effect of a water mist system (WMS) and longitudinal ventilation (LV) on the fire HRR, smoke temperature and back-layering (BL) degree were explored in a 3 m (width)×2.2 m(height)×30 m (length) tunnel model. A series of 39 tests has been conducted in 6 configurations, varying the velocity, water volume flow rate and nozzles arrangement. When the WMS or LV is imposed individually

Steel structural elements with cold-formed thin-walled sections are increasingly common in building structures due to their high strength-weight ratio. These elements can provide adequate resistance to different action efforts, such as bending, axial compression, or compression and bending. Lipped channel sections are the most commonly used sections because the application of sigma sections increase

Ordinary non-tempered glass is one of the most widely used materials in the construction industry. Knowing its fire resistance is essential to ensure the safety of emergency personnel as its failure increases the oxygen supply and causes a rapid spread of the fire (flashover phenomenon). Existing approaches for evaluating the structural fire safety of glass façades require expensive experimental tests

It has been known for a long time that older adults suffer a significantly higher risk of dying in residential fires compared to younger people. The characteristics of these fatal fires and the fatalities are also well known. However, less is known about older adults who survive fires and how they differ from those who die. This distinction can be assumed to be of great importance when designing effective

The objective of this paper is to provide experimental results related to the elevated temperature performance of connections between cold-formed steel members and sheathing. Cold-formed steel building structures rely on sheathing for their mechanical benefits including bracing against member twist, global flexural and flexural-torsional buckling, and cross-section distortional buckling, as well as

This experimental study highlights the confinement effect on a flame impinging a ceiling in confined or semi-confined environment. The enclosure used in this study represents a 1:10 scale model of a student compartment with two possible openings: a door and a window. It is developed based on the conservation of the Froude number in scaling law. The objective of this work is to provide explanations

The objective of this paper is to investigate the rate-dependent thermal behavior of fillet welds in welded lap joints subjected to different load angles. Performance of welds in fire is complex due to unexpected induced forces that are developed due to different fire-time exposures. To address this issue, an experimental program is performed to examine the rate-dependent behavior of fillet welds for

The dripping of thermoplastic fuels is a significant fire hazard, but the complex dripping-ignition process is still not fully understood. In this work, we investigate the ignition capability of continual polyethylene drips with the size of 2.6-4.6 mg and the frequency of 0.3-1 Hz. These flaming drips land on four groups of materials, cardstock papers (>0.1 mm), thin papers (≤0.1 mm), cotton, and porous

The paper presents the numerical study of tubular square T-joints under fire conditions. The sequentially coupled thermal-displacement numerical model was proposed to examine the performance of square hollow section (SHS) joints. The developed finite element (FE) model was validated against available experimental test results and applied to study the influence of dimensionless parameters on the strength

Standardized testing procedures and experimental studies in fire safety science specify repeat trials in an effort to minimize the impact of statistical variation on the presented results. Bench-scale flammability testing procedures typically require a constant number of trials – generally a total of three – across all experimental conditions. A series of experiments was conducted to quantify the influence

High strength structural steel (HSSS) can be divided into TMCP (Thermo-Mechanical Controlled Process) and QT (Quenched and Tempered) types according to the manufacturing process. Most previous studies on the post-fire mechanical properties of HSSS were conducted on QT HSSS, while few studies were conducted on TMCP HSSS. In order to identify the effect of manufacturing process on the post-fire mechanical

Concrete edge failure after fire is investigated in this study with the focus on the effect that preloading in shear may have on residual capacity of anchors. Headed stud anchors with single stud, two- and four anchor groups are exposed to the various duration of fire and loaded in shear perpendicular to the free edge of the concrete member up to failure, in both hot and cold state (after cooling)

Research was conducted to examine the use of Support Vector Regression (SVR) to build a model to forecast the potential occurrence of flashover in a single-floor, multi-room compartment fire. Synthetic temperature data for heat detectors in different rooms were generated, 1000 simulation cases are considered, and a total of 8 million data points are utilized for model development. An operating temperature

This biomechanics study explored stride length (SL), duration (SDN), and gait ground reaction forces (GRFspeak), required coefficient of friction (RCOFpeak), joint angle (anglepeak, anglemin), angular velocities (angvelx peak), angular accelerations (angaccx peak), muscle electromyography (EMG) during the dominant leg stance phase (SP) following an exhaustive stair ascent for evacuation. Data were

Advanced polymer matrix composites (PMCs) are widely used in modern aircraft and as such have to withstand fire to comply with safety regulations. The thermal degradation of these lightweight materials is a complex process involving chemical reactions in the solid and gas phases, potentially leading to flaming combustion. Here, we numerically investigate the heat feedback from the ignition of outgassing

This paper presents the results of an experimental study to investigate failure modes of intumescent coatings and their effects on temperatures attained in steel sections and fire resistance of steel columns. Tests were carried out on unloaded steel plates, unloaded short sections and axially loaded long columns. The loaded column specimens had four different surfaces, stainless steel, untreated carbon

The complex of zinc phosphate and 3-amine-1,2,4-triazole (ZN3AT) was synthesized by a one-pot reaction and used as an intumescent flame retardant (IFR) for flexible poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC). The thermal properties and fire behaviour of flexible PVC with 20 wt% of ZN3AT were investigated and compared with unmodified PVC and PVC with commercial IFR. The thermal stability and burning behaviour were

The ability of an electrical cabinet fire to spread to neighbouring cabinets is a major concern for fire safety in nuclear power plants. Twelve intermediate-scale fire tests were performed to determine the fire spread conditions (FSCs) from a burning enclosure (BE) to an opposite enclosure (OE) equipped with either a non-combustible (glazed or metallic) or a combustible (poly(methyl methacrylate),

The aim of the present work was to improve the study of wood self-extinguishment under cone calorimeter thanks to a dedicated experimental setup. A cone calorimeter was modified into a double sliding cone calorimeter in vertical orientation for studying samples extinguishment. With this new setup, the external heat flux can be quickly switched from a high to a low value seeking for the heat flux leading

Wind-driven fires were experimentally-investigated to understand the influence of varying flow conditions on the local burning behavior of a condensed fuel surface. These flames imitate the fire dynamics of hazardous fires occurring in a forced-flow environment sharing the likes of wildland fires or ventilated compartment fires. The flame structure was probed using a digital camera. Small-scale wind-driven

Understanding spatiotemporal geomorphological and pedological changes as a consequence of wildfires can allow stakeholders, land planners, and policymakers to design efficient fire safety-based afforestation and restoration programs of forest lands. The use of remote sensing techniques is a key tool to achieve this goal. The suitable combination of Sentinel-2 MSI data for mapping of different spectral

The securement and improvement of realism in a probabilistic fire risk assessment (Fire PRA) are important in risk-informed performance-based regulations and decision support. In this study, a probabilistic fire brigade non-suppression model is developed for electrical fires using the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development fire incident data on operating nuclear power plants collected

Within their lifetime, reinforced concrete structures can be subjected to extreme loadings such as fire and blast, which are often combined or occur in sequence. Frequently, a fire within a structure causes internal blasts, leading to catastrophic damages and sometimes may be the main cause of the triggering of progressive collapses. Thus, it appears crucial to investigate the mechanical response of

The global growth of urbanization has caused an increase of wildfires that devastate communities at wildland-urban interfaces. Agent-based evacuation simulation can be a powerful tool for emergency decision-makers to estimate evacuation times during rapidly propagating wildfires. However, as these models increase in size and complexity for urban areas, computation costs rise significantly, making these

The work described in this paper presents a set of experimental tests carried out in a Controlled Atmosphere Cone Calorimeter (CACC) in order to study the evaporation rate of a 250 ml-‘batch’ of n-heptane and methanol poured into an insulated 0.10 × 0.10 × 0.04 m3 steel pan and exposed to two ‘nominal’ irradiation levels of 25 and 50 kW/m2. A low oxygen concentration is imposed during the CACC tests

Fire testing of large-scale structural prototypes is costly and requires highly specialized facilities. For this reason, most of the research on the structural response to fire loading relies on cheaper single-component experiments. However, such experiments do not reproduce the internal force redistribution in a realistic assembly, which plays a pivotal role in determining the failure mode of every

This paper explores the effectiveness and applicability of a newly developed thermo-mechanical coupled damage model for use in structural fire engineering. The damage-affected structural response of frame systems is accurately reproduced in this paper, which demonstrates the capability of the coupled damage model in giving a realistic representation of steel deterioration behaviour under combined actions

A majority of coal mines in China are susceptible to fires, especially those affected by concealed fire sources in coalfield fire areas. Hence, to mitigate this problem, the efficient and precise detection of high-temperature anomalous areas is significant and needed, which mainly involves determining the range and depth of concealed fire sources. In this paper, the strengths and weaknesses of each

Effective fire detection provides early warnings and key information for first responders and people trapped insides. The idea of integrating sensor data and fire modeling presents a general framework for fire source parameter estimation. However, most methods fail to achieve a real-time accurate estimation due to complex building structures and high computational requirements. Inspired by the capability

Experiments have been carried out in a specially designed 36 m2 compartment. The experimental results show the main phenomena during the fire and smoke propagation in the compartment before sprinkler activation and additionally the interaction between the hot flue gases in the smoke layer and the water spray. The axial temperature profiles at three characteristic positions inside the compartment were

This paper presents a numerical investigation of the fire performance of eight reinforced concrete two-way slabs subjected to different in-plane restraints. A comparison of the experimental results with results predicted by a numerical model showed generally satisfactory agreement. The effects of geometric nonlinearity, or linearity, and concrete thermal strain on the fire behaviour of the tested slabs

To enhance the robustness of steel-framed structures in fire, a novel, axially ductile connection has previously been proposed. In this paper its performance is investigated when it is used to connect composite beams to steel columns in composite steel-concrete construction. The ductile connection is designed to satisfy the ductility demands of the composite beam at elevated temperatures. A reinforcement

A campaign of experiments was conducted in a previously designed bench-scale wind tunnel to determine the effectiveness of suppression of lithium ion battery fires with a clean agent, Novec 1230 (CF3CF2C(O)CF(CF3)2). The experiments were performed on twelve 18650 form factor, fully charged, lithium cobalt oxide cells arranged in a rectangular array without intercell spacing. A set of baseline experiments

Early fire detection is crucial for reducing losses due to fire. Therefore, the development of an efficient fire detection algorithm and alarm system is essential. The image fire detection algorithm is based on the mathematical analysis of images. Current algorithm evaluation methods are not effective and cannot sufficiently distinguish the performance of different detection algorithms. Therefore,

This paper investigates the structural performance of load-bearing precast concrete sandwich panels subjected to one-sided fire. It focuses on panels made with FRP diagonal-bar connectors. Heat transfer analysis is conducted for characterizing the temperature gradient within the panel and a structural model is developed. The model considers the composite action between the reinforced concrete (RC)

Transition from smoldering to flaming fire in cotton is investigated experimentally for five different sample sizes. Two different modes of transition are identified: early and late transition. Early transition to flaming occurs when smoldering combustion forms a hot glowing core inside a sample. As the smoldering burns through to the outside of the sample, air moves more easily into the core, resulting

The thermal behavior of composite steel-concrete slabs in fire is more or less known, however there are still a lot of different aspects in the fire design methods that need clarification. A comparison of the temperature distribution in the cross-section of steel decking concrete slabs subjected to fire is made through three different procedures: (a) experimental, (b) numerical and (c) analytical methods

The corner fire characteristics with two inert walls are compared against those with one or two combustible corner walls through a set of standard Single Burning Item (SBI) tests. The study examines how the corner fire behavior is affected by flame spread over one or two walls. In the case of flame spread over one corner wall, the inert side is a Calcium Silicate (CS) panel. As for the combustible

Plastic materials are used increasingly in different domains and the comprehension of the phenomena occurring when they are exposed to a thermal stress has become a huge challenge over years. Indeed, an accurately described thermal decomposition of materials can help both, determining the conditions for which ignition can occur and evaluating their participation to a fire growth and propagation. Numerous