Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A CIB research programme on the duration and temperatures of fully developed compartment fires has been completed. Data have been obtained for a wide variety of shapes, amounts and dispersion of fuel, scale and ventilation conditions. Estimates of the fire resistance tf required to survive these fires have been made and are closely proportional to L/(?AWAT) where L is the amount of fuel, AW is the window area (or its equivalent), AT is the area of the internal surfaces over which heat is lost. The constant of proportionality depends on the porosity of the fuel bed. Many published large scale experimental fires have also been examined and a similar law applies but the constent of proportionality is somewhat less than those for the CIB experiments. The relationship between this form of tf and Ingberg's correlation of fire resistance with fuel per unit floor area (L/AF) is discussed and it is suggested that Ingberg's correlation will over-estimate fire resistance requirements when (AWAT/AF2)>1/3 approx.