Multi-scale Experiments of Household Materials Burning

Abstract : In France, one home fire occurs every 2 minutes and these accidents account for 10,000 victims each year. Majority of home fires can spread very quickly because of polymer materials, increasingly used in dwelling houses. Currently, modeling fire development to aid the scale-up from bench to full scale is a big challenge. Studies combining experiments and modeling at increasing scale have already been performed. In this work, radiant panel with heat flux concentrator has been developed and used to study the combustion of household materials. The area of radiative source is equal to 2 m². Ignitability, mass loss and smoke composition (CO, CO2 and O2) data have been recorded to evaluate heat release rate. The results have been compared with those from cone calorimeter on small samples (100 cm²) at 50 kW/m² in order to study the scale effect of the testing device.