Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The experimental full-scale section of a pedestrian shopping mall at the Fire Research Station is described and results given of the first test series, designed to measure the smoke production in vision-obscuring terms of a number of materials burnt under well-ventilated large fire conditions. The amount of smoke produced is given as Ds, the optical density per metre produced by burning 1 gram of the material in a stirred volume of 1 cubic metre, and Ds can be used to obtain the visibility in other situations. Remarkably little of any of the fuels needs to be burnt to produce low visibilities in an enclosed, though large, volume. The worst materials gave an optical density per gram 7-9 times that of the best material. For wood and polyurethane agreement with data from small scale tests is reasonably satisfactory, but for polystyrene much more smoke was produced than in a test employing the fire propagation test apparatus, possibly because of a different mode of combustion.