Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The extent of fire propagation and upward spread velocity are examined for char-forming insulating materials. The extent of propagation can be defined by the critical heat flux boundary, while reduced-scale propagation experiments are shown to represent accurately large scale corner fire behavior. In wall/ceiling applications, inert facings are shown to significantly limit the extent of fire propagation even for materials exhibiting self -sustained propagation. The "apparent" flame spread velocity for these types of char-forming materials correlates well with the ratio of the convective heat release rate to the surface thermal response.