Performance of Materials and Assemblies under Realistic Fire Exposures

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This research addresses challenges that exist in predicting fire performance of interior and exterior walls, topics vital to minimizing fire spread, ensuring fire fighter and occupant safety and reducing property damage from fires. The issues have been tragically demonstrated in recent fires in UK, Dubai and British Columbia. Detailed fire response of walls should be investigated at large-scale, but facilities are limited and regulatory tests are expensive and employ a minimum of instrumentation. The resulting dearth of data, coupled with complexity of interactions between fires and walls and gaps in knowledge of high temperature properties and response of materials, has limited development of comprehensive numerical tools to predict wall response to fires. This makes it difficult to assess the impact of individual features on fire performance and restricts advancement of design tools for performance-based engineering of innovative wall designs with improved fire safety. In this NSERC CRD, a consistent set of scaled test methods will be developed to better understand the thermal response of walls under temperature and heat flux conditions typical of fires. Small-scale tests will characterize thermo-physical properties, heat and mass transport in component materials and evaluate fire damage in simple assembly designs. Comparative results for heat transfer and damage in full wall sections subjected to real fire exposures will be obtained via well instrumented intermediate-scale experiments in a new UW test facility. The data will support formulation, testing and modification of a suite of advanced numerical simulation and design tools for prediction of fire performance of component materials and full assemblies under realistic fire exposures. Successful outcomes will reduce ROCKWOOL R&D cycle costs providing them a significant market edge in developing new product applications and leading to market expansion through increased use of existing, and promotion of new, materials for fire safety applications. Continued development of new products and designs in building construction will improve life safety and have driving impact in terms of progressive construction practices and potential future modifications to building codes and related regulations.