Measurement and Prediction of Fire Smoke Toxicity of Materials in Enclosures.

Unwanted fires continue to account for a significant loss of life, damage to property, damage to business and damage to the environment. Meanwhile the cost of prevention and protection measures adds a substantial drain to an already struggling economy. The cost of fire is almost 1% of GDP while the cost of fire safety measures for a new building is around 2.5%. The action required to prevent such losses is expensive and may involve inappropriate or unnecessary measures. To address specific threats, such as fires in public buildings, or resulting from terrorism it is essential to improve our understanding of the behaviour of unwanted fires particularly the transition to under-ventilated flaming and the rapid increase in toxicity. Most fire deaths and most fire injuries actually result from inhalation of toxic gases. If reliable means of predicting toxic product yields in real-scale fires were developed, lives could be saved and costs reduced. Combustion toxicity is generally underestimated in small-scale tests, and is highly dependent on fire conditions. The project will quantify combustion toxicity using the unique design of the steady state tube furnace (SSTF) (ISO TS 19700), which allows full-scale fire behaviour, under different fire conditions, to be replicated on a small scale. Crucially, it will also use UCLan's new custom-designed Large Instrumented Fire Enclosure (LIFE) facility based at Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service's Training Centre to investigate the relationship between scales as a function of temperature and ventilation condition. This apparatus is based on a half-scale ISO 9705 room with corridor, as a reference scenario for generation of toxic products from fire, in order to validate bench-scale (ISO 19700) data for use in engineering hazard calculations, and provide crucial information on the behaviour of under-ventilated fires. The outcomes of the work have direct relevance to the fire safety engineering community (in order to predict escape times based on fire toxicity and visual obscuration) while understanding the transition to highly toxic, under-ventilated fires will save lives, and reduce costs. It will also provide materials scientists with the tools to optimise products for lower fire toxicity suitable for high risk application such as mass transport or high rise buildings.

This work will save lives, reduce injuries and save money. It is the final obstacle to the quantification of fire smoke as part of a fire hazard assessment. The immediate beneficiaries will be building specifiers and fire safety engineers, who will be able to base their assessments on a sound scientific footing, and make better judgements on selection of materials, products, and methods of construction. This will have three direct impacts - one on the manufacturing sector to address areas where fire toxicity is critical; another to stimulate regulators to ensure that their test protocols are in accordance with the best available information in high risk applications such as mass transport and defence; and a third to ensure that the fire safety of new, sustainable low energy buildings is not compromised. Materials developers will benefit greatly from being able to identify the components responsible for fire gas toxicity in real-scale fires so they can improve the fire safety of their products. The beneficiaries are represented in many sectors of UK industry. The last 10-20 years have seen a dramatic increase in the amount and variety of plastic and polymer products in homes, offices and public buildings. At the same time the fire hazard has also become an increasingly important issue. Some commercial materials and products such as brominated flame retardants in common use are under scrutiny for risks to the environment and to human health. The establishment of a small-scale apparatus to accurately model burning behaviour in large-scale fires would significantly reduce the need for expensive, large-scale tests, particularly at the materials development stage, and inform the design of a new safer generation materials and products of reduced combustion-toxicity. This work is also aimed at regulators and specifiers to ensure that their test protocols are in accordance with the best available information. The findings from the project will be reported to British Standards and other national standards bodies via the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) committees where it is anticipated that the outcome will form the basis of new standards for validating input of toxicity data for fire hazard assessment. Ultimately, this will provide the basis of a new simplified method for the measurement and prediction of fire smoke toxicity from materials and products. UK's citizens will gain from lives saved, injuries avoided and better, safer design options through the improved understanding of fire hazard, facilitating improvements in fire safety. Most crucially, the results of this project will be able to make a direct contribution to reducing the number of dwelling fire deaths injuries and injuries (87% and 82% respectively of total fire casualties). While politicians and regulators are reluctant to interfere in issues domestic safety, a major outcome of this project will be a web-based tool allowing householders to undertake their own fire risk assessment, based on the actual contents of their homes. While uptake would always be voluntary, undertaking such assessment may lead to lower insurance premises, and a better informed general public, highlighting the awareness of fire hazards in dwellings.