Systematic Literature Review on Passenger Car Fire Experiments for Car Park Safety Design

To allow future creation of knowledge-based design fire scenarios for car fires, a systematic literature review was performed. Keywords “fire + passenger vehicle” and “fire + car” were filtered in Scopus, Science Direct and Web of Science databases for 1990–2024 period yielding 11 papers containing relevant data. A further citation mining on references revealed another 33. A total of 148 individual records of fire experiments were identified, with records of the heat release rate (or mass loss rate), total heat release and time to reach peak heat release rate. The database was subdivided by the car size and drivetrain, as well by the age of experiments. Analysing the course of experiments, common phases of fires have been identified, leading to another sub-division of the database by the location of the ignition source. It was found that fires initiated from the underneath the car did lead to higher peak HRR and a shorter time to peak compared to fires starting at other locations. Statistical distributions of peak HRR, time to peak HRR and THR are given for each sub-set of data. The average Heat of Combustion value of 25 MJ/kg (± 7 MJ/kg) was identified for the entire dataset.