Horizontal Fire Spread in a Contemporary Apartment Based on a Real Fire

Abstract

The apartment fire tests comprise a set of two full-scale fire experiments in a dwelling building made from pre-fabricated concrete elements in April 2013. Two apartments were nearly identically furnished and fully instrumented with thermocouples, video cameras and gas extraction probes. The apartments were ignited successively whereupon the fire in the second apartment developed freely to post-flashover conditions and got the main focus in this report. The apartment was completely furnished with contemporary furniture and objects, and had an average fire load density for residential occupancy. A full description of the fire load, ventilation conditions and instrumentation are provided. The focus of this report is primarily to obtain conclusions on the horizontal spread of smoke throughout the apartment during the fire growth period. Velocities of smoke spreading were measured to be in the range below 0.05 m/s which means that the smoke migrated over the longest distance throughout the apartment for about 3 to 4 minutes while the flame did not leave the initial fire room. The main aim of the experiments was to collect a comprehensive set of data from a realistic and contemporary fire scenario to validate numerical simulations.