Fire Experiment Inside a Very Large and Open-Plan Compartment: x-ONE

摘要

Abstract The?traditional design fires commonly considered in structural fire engineering, like the?standard fire and Eurocode parametric fires, were developed several decades ago based on experimental compartments smaller than 100?m2 in floor area. These experiments led to the inherent assumption of flashover in design fires and that the temperatures and burning conditions are uniform in the whole of the compartment, regardless of its size. However, modern office buildings often have much larger open-plan floor areas (e.g. the Shard in London has a floor area of 1600 m2) where non-uniform fire conditions are likely to occur. This paper presents observations from a large-scale fire experiment x-ONE conducted inside a concrete farm building in Poland. The objective of x-ONE was to capture experimentally a natural fire inside a large and open plan compartment. With an open-plan floor area of 380?m2, x-ONE is the largest compartment fire experiment carried out to date. The fire was ignited at one end of the compartment and allowed to spread across a continuous wood crib (fuel load?~?370?MJ/m2). A travelling fire with clear leading and trailing edges was observed spreading along 29?m of the?compartment length. The flame spread rate was not constant but accelerated with time from 3?mm/s to 167?mm/s resulting in a gradually changing fire size. The fire travelled across the compartment and burned out at the far end 25?min after ignition. Flashover was not observed. The thermocouples and cameras installed along the fire path?show clear near-field and far-field?regions, indicating highly non-uniform spatial temperatures and burning within the compartment. The fire dynamics observed during this experiment are completely different to the fire dynamics reported in small scale compartments in previous literature and to the assumptions made in traditional design fires for structural design. This highlights the need for further research and experiments in large compartments to understand the fire dynamics and continue improving the safe design of modern buildings.