Sandwich Panel Performance in Full-scale and Bench-scale Fire Tests

Abstract

Fire hazard assessments must be primarily driven by life safety variables. Concern is often highly focused on toxicity issues, since fire deaths, in the majority of cases, are found (in whole or in part) to be due to toxic gas inhalation. Procedures have recently been published by ISO, wherein the toxicity assessment of fire products is focused primarily on bench-scale testing for toxic potency (the ‘per-gram toxicity’). Yet hazards of products with regards to fire toxicity may be determined much more by their differences in burning rates than by any differences in toxic potency. Burning rates are not assessed in the pertinent standards (ISO 13344 and ISO TR 9122). For most product categories, techniques for predicting full-scale burning rates from bench-scale data are not yet in hand. Thus, today the best means of comparing actual, full-scale toxic fire hazards is the full-scale fire test, equipped with additional gas measuring instrumentation. Such an approach is not among the recommended methods of the international standards, yet it is the only one with innate validity. In the present work, a series of sandwich panel products were tested in a full-scale room configuration. Bench-scale comparison was made to the ISO 5660 Cone Calorimeter and the DIN 53436 tube furnace. The toxic gases were quantified in all cases by chemical analysis. The product which showed the best performance in the full-scale tests (rock wool insulated sandwich panel) did not achieve a good fire toxicity performance due to minimization of toxic potency. Instead, the successful performance was attributed wholly to reduction of burning rate. Bench-scale measurements of toxic potency were shown to lack relevance to reality in such cases where even the full-scale toxic potency is not a determining factor. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.