Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In the engineering fire safety design, design fire scenario and/or design fire source would be assumed. Then the potential fire behavior is calculated by using engineering prediction methods. To assure the validity of design, the assumption of design fire scenario and fire source must be justified. At present, the assumption vastly relies upon expert judgments. However, rational basis shall be established. Fire load survey is probably the unique way to establish design fire scenario. Field survey yields fire load density (wood equivalent) and arrangement of combustible fuels. By adopting the normal procedure for survey, size, location, weight and type of materials are recorded on site of survey. Consequently, field survey of combustible is usually time and cost consuming. As a result, existing knowledge is not enough to cover all the occupancies of interest. To increase the stock of survey data, practical methods of field survey shall be established. In this study, survey was made on common combustibles to establish the correlations between characteristic size, weight, surface area, effective heat of combustion, and effective heat release rate per unit area. The results are summarized into categories (dairy goods, clothes, stationeries, kitchen goods and so on). By using the results, it is possible to make quick estimate of the fuel characteristics if surveyors know type and size (volume) of combustibles.