Scale Modeling of Compartment Fires for Structural Fire Testing

Current design for fire protection subjects an individual structural element to a standard temperature profile that is meant to ensure the element's load-carrying capacity for a predetermined period of time during a fire. While this approach satisfies the structural component's fire resistance requirement, it does not provide an understanding of the behavior of the structure in a fire. To fully understand a structure's behavior in a fire, a full-scale fire experiment is necessary. Scaled experiments offer an economical alternative to full-scale fire experiments. This paper discusses a method for scaling a compartment fire by using the laws of similitude. The profiles of hot gas temperature versus time in such a reduced-scale compartment will be similar to those in a full-scale compartment, which is a necessary condition for conducting reduced-scale structural fire testing. Experimental verification at two different scales are performed to show the validity of the proposed approach. It has been shown that ...