Comparison of the propensity of cigarettes to ignite upholstered furniture fabrics and cotton ducks (500-fabric study)

Abstract

The present study investigates the validity of a test method for smoldering cigarette ignition propensity of upholstery fabrics based on using ‘cotton duck’ fabrics, and proposed by NIST. A comparison was made between the ignition propensity of cigarettes as assessed by (1) a set of 500 upholstery fabrics (chosen at random among typical upholstery fabrics) and (2) a test method proposed by NIST (NIST 851), and based on ‘cotton duck’ fabrics. The set of 500 fabrics can be assumed to be a representative cross-section of the upholstery fabrics available in the early 1990s, while the ‘cotton duck’ fabrics are not typical upholstery fabrics, and it was unclear whether they would behave similarity or differently from upholstery fabrics. Of the 500 fabrics tested, only 145 fabrics were ignitable by cigarettes, all of them predominantly (or completely) cellulosic. This study found that the overall results obtained from the 500-upholstery fabric study correlate well with those of the ‘cotton duck’ study. Therefore, the ‘cotton ducks’ can be considered, as a whole, to behave similarly to the majority (estimated at perhaps 80%) of the upholstery fabrics available at the time of the study, and the test is valid. In this study it was also found that the ‘cotton duck’ test method correlated well with an earlier cigarette ignition test method, shown to be a good predictor of full-scale upholstered furniture cigarette ignition results, when using a set of five cigarettes. Finally, a fabric density threshold was found, above which the percentage of ignitions of cellulosic fabrics, the percentage of cellulosic fabrics that are ignitable and the flame spread rate of fabrics in a flaming ignition test are all unaffected. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.