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Exposure to ultrafine particles during fire suppression should be considered a potential contributing factor for CHD in firefighters. Of major significance is their predominance during overhaul, where firefighters frequently remove respiratory protection.

Fires doors are subjected to standard fire tests as a means of evaluating fire resistance. In this study, the thermal and mechanical response of steel double fire doors exposed to high temperatures was modeled using finite element software. The model included the necessary complexity of the product and test setup along with the temperature dependency of the constituent materials. For the thermal solution, a transient analysis was carried out while for the mechanical solution, it was found that a nonlinear steady state analysis was sufficient to capture the qualitative behavior of the fire doors seen during the test. The challenges of validating a numerical model with the limited data available from the standard fire test are described.

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Upholstered furniture remains a consumer fire hazard. Flame retardant technologies are necessary but may present a health risk from chemical exposure. This study developed methodologies for measuring exposure to flame retardants and flammability performance, comparing the effectiveness of differing flammability reduction strategies on upholstered chairs with and without added flame retardants and the use of a barrier material. The chemical analysis focused on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and flame retardants. Open flame tests were conducted on chair assemblies, and smolder resistance tests were conducted on chair materials. Results showed that VOC inhalation exposure during consumer use was low for all chair types. However, VOCs were significantly elevated during the chair burns. The organophosphorus flame retardant used in this study was found in air, settled dust and dermal transfer samples. The chairs with a barrier material demonstrated significantly lower flammability hazards when compared to the other chair types. All assembled chairs did not meet the criteria for smolder testing, suggesting a lack of correlation with open-flame performance. This study demonstrated that combined human health and flammability advantages may be achieved for upholstered chairs constructed with an effective fire barrier material without any added flame retardants.

Most modern buildings incorporate a façade system to conform to green building regulations. Several common façade systems utilize composite panels made of combustible materials and can significantly enhance the fire risk, as shown by many recent building fires. This study presents the development of a full-scale research facility at IIT Gandhinagar to better understand the behaviour of real fires involving façade systems. Such a facility will facilitate scientific studies pertaining to façade fires and help in improving fire safety of such buildings.

Fires in a room often start small with the ignition of a combustible item such as a waste paper basket. As the fire grows, a smoke layer develops at the ceiling level. The smoke, as it descends, obscures signs and egress routes thus making it difficult to escape from the fire-affected room. In this paper, a brief discussion is given on the measurement of smoke and the importance of various smoke measurement parameters and the differential equations for calculating the smoke obscurations in a room are presented. The predictions of the model are then compared with obscuration data available from room corner fire tests involving three type of wall lining materials. The comparisons are in reasonable agreements with the test data. Some loss of smoke information is observed for polystyrene foam material and this resulted in the model under predicting the smoke obscuration as compared to the fire test. This loss of information is suspected to be due to deposition of the soot on the duct surfaces during the transport process.

In the US, tests are conducted on cables based upon the usage and installation practices. For example, cables, installed in air handling spaces without a conduit, are tested in accordance in UL 910' test method. Cables used in high rise building and installed in riser shafts or installed from floor-to-floor are tested in accordance with UL 16662. Cables used in installations other than the air handling space or floor-to-floor may be tested in accordance with UL 16853. All these tests are product-scale tests requiring sample lengths from 25 ft. (for the UL 910 test) to 8 ft. ( for the UL 1685 test).With the advancement in small-scale heat release calorimetry technology, there has been a strong interest in developing small-scale tests that would permit screening of materials to be used for the appropriate applications. However, heat flux exposure from the fire tests needs to be defined to assist in determining the test parameters in the small-scale tests.In this paper, tests conducted to determine the heat flux exposure provided in the three cable fire tests are discussed. The tests were conducted using Gardon type gauges to measure the total heat flux from the ignition burners of three cable tests.Results of the UL 910 tests from this investigation compared well with existing data obtained by Parker4. The heat flux data were then scaled with respect to the flame lengths of each of the burners. The scaled data were shown to coalesce for the scaled parameter, dl,, greater than 0.4. With the scaling it was possible to approximate the total heat flux from the ignition burners with a single equation.