Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In performance-based evacuation safety design method at present, consideration of fire risk has been insufficient. In order to develop the framework of performance-based evacuation safety verification, the authors have proposed a methodology for selecting both design fire scenarios and design fires based on fire risk in fire, which we call Risk-based Evacuation Safety Design Method. In the Risk-based Evacuation Safety Design Method fire growth factor ?and its distribution f(?) is one of the key points. We analyze the data of fire growth time (t) and burned area (Af) in the national fire statistics in Japan to obtain distributions of fire growth factor in real fire situations in terms of burned area. Then we estimate a heat release rate per unit floor area using the existing fire load density survey and burn experiments. The distributions of fire growth factor f(?) are obtained by multiplying the burned area growth factor (Af/t2) and the heat release rate per unit floor area (q”) . It is found that the distributions of fire growth factor f(?) follows Log-normal distribution and that the fire growth factors from the existing experiments are within a reasonable range of the distributions.