FIRE SAFETY ENGINEERING APPLIED TO THE EVALUATION OF THE SAFETY LEVEL OF MARINE COMPOSITE STRUCTURES

摘要

This paper presents the fire safety engineering methodology developed in the project MP08 Fire performance of composites for shipbuilding. This methodology is compliant with maritime regulations: SOLAS Chapter II-2/17 Alternative Design and Arrangements for Fire Safety. It is based on the equivalence principle which balances the safety level of an alternative construction (in composites) with the one of a construction complying with prescriptive requirements (in steel). An interesting feature of the adopted methodology is that it makes it possible to size the protection level to the actual risk level for various room categories. In order to limit the number of tests to be performed, it was decided to make the equivalence assessment by simulation. Therefore this methodology requires validated simulation tools. A pyrolysis model was developed in order to take into account the combustion of the composite, which is the principal difference between the fire simulations on composite and on steel. This pyrolysis model was validated at different scales. The remaining parts of the models identical with composite and steel were assumed to preserve equivalency, i.e. not introducing bias.