Smoke and heat release and ignitability as measures of fire hazard from burning of carpet tiles

Abstract

A series of 22 commercial carpet tiles, covering the range of backings found in the marketplace, and with the same face material (nylon) was chosen for fire testing. All the carpets were tested in the cone calorimeter rate of heat release apparatus. They were also all tested in the NBS smoke density chamber, in the flaming mode. A selection of samples was further tested using the flooring radiant panel. A preliminary investigation was made to choose the optimum radiant incident flux to be used, which was determined to be 25 kW/m 2. It was found that the carpets showed a wide range of fire performance, including ranges of peak rate of heat release and of time to ignition of c. 3 and of smoke factor of c. 8. It was not found possible to correlate the results of the NBS smoke chamber or radiant panel tests with any of the results obtained from the cone calorimeter. A classification scheme was proposed to determine fire performance of carpets, based on the ratio of time to ignition (in seconds) and peak rate of heat release (in kW/m 2). According to this scheme, four categories of fire performance would be expected: 4 I Ratio ≥0·40 II 0·40> Ratio ≥0·20 III 0·20> Ratio ≥0·10 IV 0·10> Ratio