Material properties and the energy balance in standardized fire testing

Building Research Institute, Filtrowa St. 1, Warszawa 00-611, Poland

^* Corresponding author: w.wegrzynski@itb.pl

Abstract

The origins of standardised fire testing can be traced back to 1870’s, and the origin of the standard temperature-time curve to 1917. This approach, based on a 19th-century intuition is still in use up to this day, to design the 21st-century structures. Standardized fire-testing ultimately disregards the conservation of energy in the fire, as in every test the resulting temperature of the test must be the same (precisely as the temp.-time curve). To maintain this, different amount of heat is required in every test, which means that every time a different fire is modelled within the furnace. The differences between furnace fire sizes are ignored in the certification process, but can be interesting for fire researchers to understand how different materials behave in fire conditions. In this paper, Authors explore this topic by investigating the energy balance within the furnace, and comparing different fire tests together.