An experimental study of full-scale open floor plan enclosure fires

Hidalgo, Juan P.; Cowlard, Adam; Abecassis-Empis, Cecilia; Maluk, Cristián; Majdalani, A.; Kahrmann, S.; Hilditch, R.; Krajcovic, Michal; Torero, José L.

doi:10.1016/j.firesaf.2017.02.002

Cited by 48 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…In 2013, the Edinburgh Tall Building Tests (ETFT) programme was carried out at the Building Research Establishment, Watford, United Kingdom [22]. The first stage of tests (Jan-May 2013) consisted of gas burner tests in a compartment of internal dimensions 5 m (width) x 18 m (length) x 2 m (height), and where different fire and ventilation modes were replicated.…”

Section: Real Fires For the Safe Design Of Tall Buildingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Malveira fire test: Full-scale demonstration of fire modes in open-plan compartments

Hidalgo

Goode

Gupta

et al. 2019

Fire Safety Journal

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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 (#$

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Section: Real Fires For the Safe Design Of Tall Buildingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Malveira fire test: Full-scale demonstration of fire modes in open-plan compartments

Hidalgo

Goode

Gupta

et al. 2019

Fire Safety Journal

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“…Majdalani et al 29 31 This analysis showed that the largest contribution to the energy loss is through compartment openings. This finding implies that considering fuelcontrolled fires with large openings in a design compartment would generally underestimate the fire impact for structural design compared to ventilation control, and thus highlights the importance of addressing the role of the openings, and uncertainties in glazing failure, for a large design compartment under travelling fires.…”

Section: The Openings For a Design Compartmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Via extrapolation from these results, it was suggested that fuel‐controlled fires are more practical and perhaps more critical for structural fire design in large compartments, compared with ventilation‐controlled fires. Via a test series in large compartments (5 m wide, 2 m high, and 18 m deep), Maluk et al quantitatively challenged the validity of the conventional compartment fire framework by analysing the energy distribution under different ventilation conditions . This analysis showed that the largest contribution to the energy loss is through compartment openings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Figure compares the results of previous full‐scale natural fire tests carried out in large compartments, where a clear travelling fire development had been identified or targeted, in order to investigate the relationship between the inverse opening factor A T /( A w H 1/2 ) and the maximum average gas‐phase temperature T g ,max near the ceiling level. The full‐scale travelling fire experiments considered include the British Steel Technical/Fire Research Station 1993 fire test series, the Building Research Establishment tests in the Cardington Large Building Test Facility in 1995 to 1996 (Test 6, Simulated Office), the Moinuddin and Thomas fire test series in 2005, the Veselí Travelling Fire Test in 2011, the Edinburgh Tall Building Fire Tests (tests number 11 and 12, using wood sticks) in 2013, the Malveira Fire Test in 2014, the Tisova Fire Test in 2015, and the TRAFIR‐RISE Fire Test in 2018. The detailed test set‐up of these travelling fire experiments has been reviewed by the authors in a previous work, except for the TRAFIR‐RISE Fire Test which is so far unpublished.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An extended travelling fire method framework for performance‐based structural design

et al. 2020

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Summary This paper presents the extended travelling fire method (ETFM) framework, which considers both energy and mass conservation for the fire design of large compartments. To identify its capabilities and limitations, the framework is demonstrated in representing the travelling fire scenario in the Veselí Travelling Fire Test. The comparison between the framework and the test is achieved through performing a numerical investigation of the thermal response of the structural elements. The framework provides good characterization of maximum steel temperatures and the relative timing of thermal response curves along the travelling fire trajectory, though it does not currently address a non‐uniform fire spread rate. The test conditions are then generalized for parametric studies, which are used to quantify the impact of other design parameters, including member emissivity, convective heat transfer coefficient, total/radiative heat loss fractions, fire spread rate, fire load density, and various compartment opening dimension parameters. Within the constraints of this study, the inverse opening factor and total heat loss prove to be the most critical parameters for structural fire design.

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“…In 2013 a series of experiments in support of the project 'Real Fires for Safe Design of Tall Buildings' [13] [43] was conducted by the University of Edinburgh at the BRE in UK. The aim of these experiments is for obtaining a better understanding of how a fire progresses in a large compartment and affects the temperature distribution spatially and temporally.…”

Section: Bre Travelling Fire Test (Uk 2013)mentioning

confidence: 99%

A critical review of “travelling fire” scenarios for performance-based structural engineering

Dai

Welch

Usmani

2017

Fire Safety Journal

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Many studies of the thermal and structural behaviour for large compartments in fire carried out over the past two decades show that fires in such compartments have a great deal of non-uniformity (e.g. Stern-Gottfried et al. [1]), unlike the homogeneous compartment temperature assumption in the current fire safety engineering practice. Furthermore, some large compartment fires may burn locally and tend to move across entire floor plates over a period of time. This kind of fire scenario is beginning to be idealized as travelling fires in the context of performance-based structural and fire safety engineering. This paper presents a literature review of the travelling fire research topic and its state of the art, including both the experimental and theoretical work for the past twenty years. It is found that the main obstacle of developing the travelling fire knowledge is the lack of understanding of the physical mechanisms behind this kind of fire scenario, which requires more reasonable large scale travelling fire experiments to be set up and carried out. The demonstration of the development of a new travelling fire framework is also presented in this paper, to show how current available experimental data hinder the analytical model development, and the urgent need that the new travelling fire experiments should be conducted.

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An experimental study of full-scale open floor plan enclosure fires

Cited by 48 publications

References 16 publications

The Malveira fire test: Full-scale demonstration of fire modes in open-plan compartments

The Malveira fire test: Full-scale demonstration of fire modes in open-plan compartments

An extended travelling fire method framework for performance‐based structural design

A critical review of “travelling fire” scenarios for performance-based structural engineering

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