Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

The steady state tube furnace has been developed from BS 7990 into the first internationally recognized standard for assessment of fire gas toxicity, ISO TS 19700. The apparatus has been shown to reliably replicate different fire stages, and is capable of generating toxic product yields as a function of the equivalence ratio ?. Work is reported from 5 laboratories currently using the steady state tube furnace where it has been used to assess the toxic product yields from a range of generic polymer materials, as a function of equivalence ratio. For the polymers tested, (LDPE, PP, PVC, Nylon, and PS) a high degree of reproducibility is observed across the range of ventilation conditions. In particular, the carbon monoxide yield, which is most susceptible to fire conditions shows consistent behaviour, which is independent of a particular laboratory.