Standardized fire behaviour tests

Although fire no longer causes the major disasters of the Middle Ages, such as the Great Fire of London in 1666, it is still responsible for the deaths of many people every year, as well as for considerable damage and sometimes environmental damage. The problem of fire is not yet under control, and will doubtless always be difficult to control.

Until such time as sufficient technical knowledge was available, many empirical means were used to compensate for the lack of scientific, technical and even practical knowledge. Fire was dealt with using more or less random solutions, in reaction to major disasters, sometimes forgetting the fundamental principles applicable to any system, such as that of the "weakest link".

Since the 1960s, studies and research have been rationalized, and the work of scientists has laid the foundations of fire science. While the phenomena of combustion of very simple elements, such as gases, have been known for a very long time, the principles of thermal decomposition and combustion of materials, although having made great progress in recent years, are still the subject of much research [SE 2 066] .

Knowledge of combustion mechanisms (including the thermal decomposition of plastics [AM 5 330] ) gives an indication, but is unfortunately not sufficient to extend the fire safety concepts applicable to a given field to all possible cases of use of a material, for example as a construction product or as part of a transport system. The number of parameters specific to a material is already very large, but those due to its environment and its evolution, both during its use and during the course of the thermal phenomenon at the origin of the fire, are even larger. In addition to questions of material selection, the assembly of materials to form products, for example multi-layered products, and then complex systems such as facades or roofs, further complicates the approach.

The solution of carrying out full-scale tests then comes to mind, but their limitations are also related to the above considerations, and such tests will only represent a tiny fraction of the configurations that...