Tisova Fire Test – Fire behaviours and lessons learnt

Abstract

One of the largest unknowns in structural fire engineering design is the fire itself, particularly in large internal environments, where real fires have been observed to travel around the floor plate. Several methodologies have been proposed to characterise these fires, most of which rely on the separation of the fire exposure into two so-called fields - near and far – allowing simplifying assumptions to be made. These models are now being used in the structural fire design. However, there is a paucity of validation data for these models with only a few tests reported in the literature. The Tisova Fire Test was conducted on the ground floor of a 4-storey concrete frame building, with concrete and composite deck floors. The fire compartment had a total area of ca. 230 m2, a height of 4.21–4.28 m, and a uniform fuel bed across the floor at 40 kg/m2. This paper presents temperatures, spread rate and the observed behaviour of the travelling fire, comparing the current design guidance with the low temperatures observed in the experiment. The paper also examines the experimental issues and the planning of these experiments with a view to helping others plan for and execute large scale fire tests in the future.