Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

There is a strong desire in the fire safety community for methods that use bench-scale test data to predict the final outcome of full-scale fire tests. The current project has the objective of meeting this goal through modeling an intermediate-scale test called the parallel panel test and comparing the results of the test with FM Approvals 25 ft Corner Test (ANSI FM 4880). The Corner Test has been used to evaluate the fire hazard of insulated wall and plastic interior/exterior building panels. As the first step of the project, a model predicting the total heat release rates from the burning parallel panel tests using the data obtained by the bench-scale tests was developed. The heat release rates of the sand burner at the bottom of the parallel panels were varied during the tests for each different panel material. The results of the comparison were very favorable. However, comparisons with the 25 ft Corner Tests indicate that an improved correlation with the parallel panel configuration could be obtained by a modification of the space and the burner size.