TITLE:
Horizontal Fire Spread in a Contemporary Apartment Based on a Real Fire
AUTHORS:
Stefanie Schubert-Polzin, Alexander Saupe, Ulrich Krause
KEYWORDS:
Apartment Fire, Horizontal Fire Spread, Smoke Spreading, Full-Scale Fire Test
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Civil Engineering,
Vol.9 No.4,
December
31,
2019
ABSTRACT: The
apartment fire tests comprise a set of two full-scale fire experiments in a
dwelling building made from pre-fabricated concrete elements in April 2013. Two apartments were nearly identically
furnished and fully instrumented with thermocouples, video cameras and gas extraction probes. The apartments were
ignited successively whereupon
the fire in the second apartment developed freely to post-flashover conditions
and got the main focus in this report. The apartment was completely furnished with contemporary furniture and objects, and had an average fire load density
for residential occupancy. A full
description of the
fire load, ventilation conditions and instrumentation are provided. The focus of this report
is primarily to obtain conclusions on the horizontal spread of smoke throughout the apartment during the fire growth
period. Velocities
of smoke spreading were measured to be in the range below 0.05 m/s which means
that the smoke migrated over the longest distance throughout the apartment for about 3 to 4 minutes while the flame did not leave the initial fire room. The main aim of the
experiments was to collect
a comprehensive set of data from a realistic and contemporary fire scenario to
validate numerical simulations.