This paper presents a review of the pyrolysis, ignition, and combustion processes associated with wood, for application in tall timber construction. The burning behaviour of wood is complex. However the processes behind pyrolysis, ignition, combustion, and extinction are generally well understood, with good agreement in the fire science literature over a wide range of experimental conditions for key parameters such as critical heat flux for ignition (12 kW/m 2 ± 2 kW/m 2) and heat of combustion (17.5 MJ/kg ± 2.5 MJ/kg). These parameters are key for evaluating the risks posed by using timber as a construction material. Conversely, extinction conditions are less well defined and understood, with critical mass loss rates for extinction varying from 2.5 g/m 2 s to 5 g/m 2 s. A detailed meta-analysis of the fire resistance literature has shown that the rate of burning as characterised by charring rate averaged over the full test duration is observed to vary with material properties, in particular density and moisture content which induce a maximum 18% variability over the ranges expected in design. System properties are also shown to be important, with stochastic phenomena such as delamination and encapsulation failure resulting in changes to the charring rate that cannot be easily predicted. Finally, the fire exposure as defined by incident heat flux has by far the largest effect on charring rates over typical heat fluxes experienced in compartment fires. Current fire design guidance for engineered timber products is largely prescriptive, relying on fixed ''charring rates'' and ''zero-strength layers'' for structural analyses, and typically prescribing gypsum encapsulation to prevent or delay the involvement of timber in a fire. However, it is clear that the large body of scientific knowledge that exists can be used to explicitly address the fire safety issues that the use of timber introduces. However the application of this science in real buildings is identified as a key knowledge gap which if explored, will enable improved efficiencies and innovations in design.
This paper aims to characterize dynamics of a fire in the Large-Scale Demonstrator Malveira Fire Test, a full-scale fire experiment carried out in a disused industrial building in Portugal. The Malveira Fire Test is the second stage in the series of full-scale experimental programmes developed for the Real Fires for the Safe Design of Tall Buildings project at the University of Edinburgh. This experiment is intended to act as a real-building demonstration of fire dynamics in large open-floor plan compartments and has as objective to provide a data set to contrast methodologies aiming at design fire inputs representative of real fire dynamics in compartments typical of tall buildings. The Malveira Fire Test showed three distinct fire behaviour modes characterised by the ratio between the velocities of the fire front (") and the burnout front (#$
The following journal and conference papers have been published over the course of this thesis. Where these are based on part or whole of a chapter of this thesis, this is indicated.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.