Scale Modeling of Compartment Fires for Structural Fire Testing

摘要

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 the method can be applied to simulate the fire loading on the structure of the World Trade Center tower on 11 September, 2001.