BFRL Program

Reduced Risk of Flashover

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Component Projects

The intended outcome of this program is to reduce the risk of flashover cost-effectively by enabling: new/improved materials whose fire resistance does not negatively impact performance, cost, or the environment; and early and certain fire and environment sensing and automatic fire suppression technologies compatible with occupants and the environment.

 

Intended Outcome and Background

Flashover is the dramatic and sudden transition from a relatively small, slowly developing fire, spreading systematically across adjacent fuel surfaces within a room, to a much larger and dangerous fire in which all flammable surfaces within the enclosure are involved.  Estimates based on United States fire statistics indicate that the roughly 20 % of reported fires that transition to flashover are responsible for 80 % of the fire deaths and property damage in buildings.  Annual losses in buildings are typically 3000 deaths and around eight and a half billion dollars.  Clearly, reducing the risk of flashover offers an opportunity to reduce significantly the high human and property costs of fire to the Nation.

Reducing the risk of flashover can be equated with reducing fire spread, fire growth, and the maximum value of the heat release rate.  There are two general approaches for accomplishing these goals.  The first is to limit the availability of fuel (e.g., through the use of fire-retarded fuels) and air (e.g., by controlling ventilation) such that a fire cannot become sufficiently intense to induce flashover.  The second is to provide physical intervention (e.g., through automatic sprinklers, or by a fire company following early detection) to reduce the fire size before it can grow to a dangerous level.  Both approaches are important and are included in this program. 

Experimental and theoretical understanding of fire growth and spread within enclosures will be improved, with the goal of developing a modeling capability for real-world room contents that can be reliably used for fire safety engineering, product design, and materials assessment.  As part of this effort a workshop designed to assess the current understanding of Fire Growth and Spread on Real Objects was held at NIST in March, 2002 (Peacock and Pitts, NIST Special Publication 998, 2003, http://www.fire.nist.gov/bfrlpubs/flamespread/).   

BFRL is working to develop cost-effective approaches that reduce the flammability of polymers while maintaining or even improving their physical characteristics.  Success in this approach will provide a strong incentive for polymer producers and product manufacturers to utilize safer materials in commodity applications. 

Active measures to limit fire growth require reliable early fire detection and effective suppression approaches.  Directed research designed to enhance fire detector response while reducing the number of false alarms and to improve suppression effectiveness is underway.

 

 

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