Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

An explosion in the ground floor flat of a 16-storey block caused severe damage to the flat, some other parts of the 16-storey block and resulted in the failure of many windows in surrounding property. Calculations based on the decay of pressure with distance, and the dimensions and thickness of glazing broken in nearby buildings, indicate that the peak explosion pressure within the flat was between 46 and 81 kN/m^2 (6.5 and 11.5 lbf/in2 ). These pressures are substantially greater than those that would be expected from measurements made from explosions in single, empty, compartments, and are also greater than that calculated from an equation making some allowance for turbulence, and indicate that a high degree of turbulence was generated by the complexity of the compartmentation and the contents of the flat. These findings emphasise the importance of tests to be carried out by the Fire Research Station in a complex array of compartments and corridors and the development of appropriate mathematical expressions for the relationship between vent area and explosion pressure for a given set of conditions.