Thermal characteristics of externally venting flames and their effect on the exposed façade surface

In a compartment fire, Externally Venting Flames (EVF) may significantly increase the risk of fire spreading to adjacent floors or buildings, especially when combustible insulation materials are installed on the building façade. An increasing number of recent reports suggest that existing fire engin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFire safety journal Vol. 91; pp. 451 - 460
Main Authors Asimakopoulou, Eleni K., Kolaitis, Dionysios I., Founti, Maria A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Lausanne Elsevier Ltd 01.07.2017
Elsevier BV
Subjects
Building codes
Buildings
Compartment fires
Correlation analysis
Design engineering
Emissivity
Eurocode
Externally venting flames
Façade fires
Fire load
Fire protection
Fire safety requirements
Fires
Flammability
Heat flux
Heat transfer
Insulation
Predictions
Safety engineering
Temperature
Façade fires
Compartment fires
Externally venting flames
Heat transfer
Eurocode
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Summary:In a compartment fire, Externally Venting Flames (EVF) may significantly increase the risk of fire spreading to adjacent floors or buildings, especially when combustible insulation materials are installed on the building façade. An increasing number of recent reports suggest that existing fire engineering design methodologies cannot describe with sufficient accuracy the characteristics of EVF under realistic fire load conditions. In this context, a series of fire safety engineering design correlations used to describe the main EVF thermal characteristics, namely EVF centreline temperature and EVF-induced heat flux on the exposed façade surface, are comparatively assessed. Towards this end, measurements obtained in a medium- and a large-scale compartment-façade fire test are employed; aiming to broaden the scope of the validation study, predictions of the investigated correlations are further compared to measurements obtained in 6 large-scale fire tests found in the literature. It is found that the correlation proposed in EN1991-1–2 (Eurocode 1) for the estimation of the EVF centreline temperature is under-predicting the measured values in large-scale fire tests. In addition, it is concluded that estimation of the local flame emissivity should take into account the specific fuel type used in each case.
ISSN:0379-7112
1873-7226
DOI:10.1016/j.firesaf.2017.03.075