International Journal of High-Rise Buildings (국제초고층학회논문집)

Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat Korea (한국초고층도시건축학회)
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A Review and Analysis of the Thermal Exposure in Large Compartment Fire Experiments

  • Gupta, Vinny (School of Civil Engineering, The University of Queensland) ;
  • Hidalgo, Juan P. (School of Civil Engineering, The University of Queensland) ;
  • Lange, David (School of Civil Engineering, The University of Queensland) ;
  • Cowlard, Adam (Torero, Abecassis Empis and Cowlard Ltd.) ;
  • Abecassis-Empis, Cecilia (Torero, Abecassis Empis and Cowlard Ltd.) ;
  • Torero, Jose L. (Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering, University College London)
  • Published : 2021.12.01
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Abstract

Developments in the understanding of fire behaviour for large open-plan spaces typical of tall buildings have been greatly outpaced by the rate at which these buildings are being constructed and their characteristics changed. Numerous high-profile fire-induced failures have highlighted the inadequacy of existing tools and standards for fire engineering when applied to highly-optimised modern tall buildings. With the continued increase in height and complexity of tall buildings, the risk to the occupants from fire-induced structural collapse increases, thus understanding the performance of complex structural systems under fire exposure is imperative. Therefore, an accurate representation of the design fire for open-plan compartments is required for the purposes of design. This will allow for knowledge-driven, quantifiable factors of safety to be used in the design of highly optimised modern tall buildings. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art experimental research on large open-plan compartment fires from the past three decades. We have assimilated results collected from 37 large-scale compartment fire experiments of the open-plan type conducted from 1993 to 2019, covering a range of compartment and fuel characteristics. Spatial and temporal distributions of the heat fluxes imposed on compartment ceilings are estimated from the data. The complexity of the compartment fire dynamics is highlighted by the large differences in the data collected, which currently complicates the development of engineering tools based on physical models. Despite the large variability, this analysis shows that the orders of magnitude of the thermal exposure are defined by the ratio of flame spread and burnout front velocities (VS / VBO), which enables the grouping of open-plan compartment fires into three distinct modes of fire spread. Each mode is found to exhibit a characteristic order of magnitude and temporal distribution of thermal exposure. The results show that the magnitude of the thermal exposure for each mode are not consistent with existing performance-based design models, nevertheless, our analysis offers a new pathway for defining thermal exposure from realistic fire scenarios in large open-plan compartments.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work is part of the EPSRC funded Real Fires for the Safe Design of Tall Buildings project (Grant: No. EP/J001937/1). Additional funding support was provided from the RFCS funded TRAFIR project (Grant No. 754198). We thank all those involved in the large-scale experiments that underpin this paper. In particular, we extend our thanks (in no particular order) to Dr Johan Sjostrom, Dr Stephen Welch, Dr Simo Hostikka, Dr Frantisek Wald and Dr Kamila Cabova for assistance in accessing older data sets. We are grateful to Prof. Bart Merci and Prof. Ali Rangwala for their comments on the first author's PhD thesis, which has helped improve this paper. We acknowledge helpful contributions from Ian Pope, Elhalm Saffari and Dr Felix Weisner regarding the data processing and presentation. The thoughts and concepts expressed in this paper have resulted from extensive discussions with numerous individuals over the years, to whom we are truly grateful.

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