摘要 :
Fires in which soft furnishings (upholstered furniture and beds) were either the first item ignited or were identified as the major item in the fire's growth are the deadliest of residential fires. This Special Issue of Fire and M...
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Fires in which soft furnishings (upholstered furniture and beds) were either the first item ignited or were identified as the major item in the fire's growth are the deadliest of residential fires. This Special Issue of Fire and Materials on Furniture Flammability grew from a small session on this subject in Interflam 2019. The issue contains 14 papers that describe the fire problems of soft furnishings, research to better understand their burning behavior, and recent success in and promising approaches to reducing the losses from these fires. This introduction concludes with the author's challenges to the fire safety community for reducing the number and consequences of soft furnishings fires.
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摘要 :
Home fires in which soft furnishings were first ignited or contributed to fire spread cause a disproportionate share of US home fire deaths. Although the death toll from these fires is much lower than in the 1980s, the rate of dea...
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Home fires in which soft furnishings were first ignited or contributed to fire spread cause a disproportionate share of US home fire deaths. Although the death toll from these fires is much lower than in the 1980s, the rate of death per 1000 reported fires has doubled. Data from the National Fire Incident Reporting System and the National Fire Protection Association's annual Fire Experience Survey were used to create national estimates of these fires and casualties. Including both fires in which upholstered furniture was the item first ignited and contributed most to fire spread, in 2013-2017, upholstered furniture was involved in an estimated average of 7120 (2%) home fires per year, resulting in an average of 570 (22%) deaths per year. Mattresses or bedding were involved in estimated average of 10 530 (3%) home fires per year, resulting in an average of 370 (14%) deaths annually. In most of these fires and deaths, the item was first ignited. Smoking materials were the leading cause of these fires (20%-26%) and associated deaths (52%-54%). Various types of operating equipment and small open flames also play a role. Understanding the causes of these fires is essential to develop new strategies to prevent them.
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Regulations for cigarette ignition resistance (CIR) of soft furnishings (beds and upholstered furniture) and less fire-prone cigarettes have contributed substantially to the decrease in losses from cigarette-initiated fires over t...
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Regulations for cigarette ignition resistance (CIR) of soft furnishings (beds and upholstered furniture) and less fire-prone cigarettes have contributed substantially to the decrease in losses from cigarette-initiated fires over time. Two standard reference cigarettes play key roles in mitigating these losses and in sustaining the effectiveness of the fire safety regulations as exogenous changes occur. SRM 1082 provides a uniform, durable supply of cigarettes for use in ASTM E2187 that assures manufacturers and regulators of compliance with regulations for reduced ignition propensity cigarettes; enables quality control of cigarette fire test performance; enables assurance of uniform interlaboratory test results; obviates effects on fire safety as tobacco crops and smokers change over time; and, when the original ASTM E2187 substrate material was no longer available, enabled adding a new, equivalent substrate. SRM 1196 provides a uniform, durable supply of cigarettes for assurance of consistent interlaboratory evaluation of the ignition resistance of soft furnishings using the mandated test methods; obviates possible unknown changes in soft furnishings' CIR due to the evolving ignition strength of the original test cigarette over time; and provided a test cigarette that was stronger than most cigarettes being smoked after manufacture of the original commercial test cigarette ceased.
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This paper uses fire statistics to show the importance of fire toxicity on fire deaths and injuries, and the importance of upholstered furniture and bedding on fatalities from unwanted fires. The aim was to compare the fire hazard...
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This paper uses fire statistics to show the importance of fire toxicity on fire deaths and injuries, and the importance of upholstered furniture and bedding on fatalities from unwanted fires. The aim was to compare the fire hazards (fire growth and smoke toxicity) using different upholstery materials. Four compositions of sofa-bed were compared: three meeting UK Furniture Flammability Regulations (FFR), and one using materials without flame retardants intended for the mainland European market. Two of the UK sofa-beds relied on chemical flame retardants to meet the FFR, the third used natural materials and a technical weave in order to pass the test. Each composition was tested in the bench-scale cone calorimeter (ISO 5660) and burnt as a whole sofa-bed in a sofa configuration in a 3.4 x 2.25 x 2.4 m(3) test room. All of the sofas were ignited with a No. 7 wood crib; the temperatures and yields of toxic products are reported. The sofa-beds containing flame retardants burnt somewhat more slowly than the non flame retarded EU sofa-bed, but in doing so produced significantly greater quantities of the main fire toxicants, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide. Assessment of the effluents' potential to incapacitate and kill is provided showing the two UK flame retardant sofa-beds to be the most dangerous, followed by the sofa-bed made with European materials. The UK sofa-bed made only from natural materials (Cottonsafe) burnt very slowly and produced very low concentrations of toxic gases. Including fire toxicity in the FFR would reduce the chemical flame retardants and improve fire safety. Crown Copyright (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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There exists a variety of specialized fire dynamics routines, zone fire models, and field fire models. Many of these heuristics and correlations rely on experimental data from fires fueled by gas burners or liquid pool fires and h...
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There exists a variety of specialized fire dynamics routines, zone fire models, and field fire models. Many of these heuristics and correlations rely on experimental data from fires fueled by gas burners or liquid pool fires and have had minimal, if any, validation against data from fires with solid, more complex fuels, such as upholstered furniture. One hundred and twenty fire experiments were conducted inside a compartment that contained a single ventilation opening in the form of a doorway that was either open or closed for the entirety of each experiment. The fires were fueled by natural gas burners and upholstered furniture items. The compartment was instrumented throughout with thermocouples, oxygen sampling probes, heat flux gauges (total and radiative), pressure transducers, and bi-directional probes. Additionally, heat release rate data were collected during open door experiments with fires larger than 100 kW. This experimental series was designed to better quantify the repeatability of and differences between natural gas burner and upholstered furniture fuels and to provide new validation cases for the fire modeling community.
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This work examines the time evolution and spatial distribution of five combustion gases during a large-scale ventilation-limited furniture fire experiment. Past research has largely focused on measurement of major gases collected ...
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This work examines the time evolution and spatial distribution of five combustion gases during a large-scale ventilation-limited furniture fire experiment. Past research has largely focused on measurement of major gases collected in an exhaust hood or at limited locations during gas or liquid fuel fires in a single room or single -storey layout. As such, there is a dearth of temporally resolved gas species data, measured in-situ at various locations in a two-storey structure. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive set of gas concentration data collected throughout a two-storey, multi-compartment, completely sealed structure during a furniture fire. Higher concentrations of CO, NOx, HCN and VOCs were measured in areas close to the fire and in the smoke layer, while a uniform distribution of gases was recorded further away from the fire, namely on the upper floor. The results are critical to our understanding of gaseous species evolution during ventilation-limited fires and provides additional insights for tenability and other fire safety measures within a residential context.
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The originality of this review is to evaluate the risks and benefits induced by the use of flame retardants in upholstered furniture in continental Europe, throughout an assessment of the risks over the whole life cycle.
This pap...
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The originality of this review is to evaluate the risks and benefits induced by the use of flame retardants in upholstered furniture in continental Europe, throughout an assessment of the risks over the whole life cycle.
This paper examines the currently available literature on the various risks linked to the use of flame retardants in upholstered furniture in the continental European market:
1. Risk linked to the exposure of workers to flame retardants during manufacture.
2. Risk of exposure to flame retardants in dwelling houses under normal living conditions, which mainly results in inhalation of accumulated flame retardants released in the interior air and/or in migration of substances as well as contamination by skin contact.
3. Risk of emission of toxic gases when manufactured products are recycled.
4. Risk of aggravated emissions of toxic gases in the case of accidental fires caused by cigarettes or matches on upholstered furniture, whether it is flame retarded or not. The CBUF program, as well as studies from the LNE and a European research program, has studied the emission and level of acute toxicants (CO, CO_2, NO_x, HCl, HBr, HCN, SO_2) released by selected flame-retarded or not upholstered furniture during fire.
A methodology has been proposed to estimate the risks and benefits of flame retardants used in upholstered furniture, within the life cycle risk assessment. For common flame retardants, data sheets have been written in order to evaluate the complete risk balance. This concerns the long-term impact on health of exposure to products containing flame retardants, as well as from exposure to their fire effluents.
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Results are presented from a number of fire experiments that were conducted in a room environment to study the fire characteristics of typical residential furnishings and assist in the design of a subsequent phase of a project inv...
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Results are presented from a number of fire experiments that were conducted in a room environment to study the fire characteristics of typical residential furnishings and assist in the design of a subsequent phase of a project involving fully furnished room fire experiments. The experiments were conducted in a 16-m(2) test room (with dimensions 3.8m widex4.2m longx2.4m high), which had a 1.5x1.5-m window opening. The furnishings tested included mattresses, bed clothes, bed assemblies, upholstered seating furniture, clothing arrangements, books, plastic audio/video media and storage cases, toys, shoes, and a computer workstation setup. The smoke (gaseous products of combustion) from the room was collected using a hood system in order to measure the heat release rate (HRR) and optical density of the smoke. The test room was instrumented with load cells, heat flux gauges, thermocouples and velocity probes in order to take the following measurements: mass loss, total heat flux on gauge-installed flush with the internal surfaces (floor, walls, and ceiling), temperatures at numerous locations, and gas velocities in the window opening. Twin-size mattresses produced peak HRRs of approximately 3800kW, and the maximum room temperature was approximately 980 degrees C. The HRRs of bed assemblies of various sizes and configurations ranged from 1800kW for a twin-size bed to 6250kW for a bunk bed. The maximum temperature and heat flux recorded in the experiments were 1071 degrees C and 221kW/m(2), respectively. Upholstered chairs and sofas had HRRs ranging from 630kW for an ottoman to 3360kW for a two-seat sofa. In tests with clothing, toys, shoes, books, a computer workstation, and CD/DVD media, the peak HRRs ranged from 440kW for a bookcase to 2045kW for toys. Furnishings containing a large proportion of rigid thermoplastic plastics, such as shoes and media cases, produced very dense smoke even at low HRRs. The effect of parameters such as bed clothes, mattress type, foundation type, bed assembly and chair size, material composition, and fuel package arrangement was evident in the results. Because the room dimensions and wall lining materials remained constant, temperatures were linearly proportional to the peak HRR (and exposure time) until the ventilation limit (approximately 4100kW) was reached. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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About 80% of all fire fatalities in Germany occur because of fires in homes. It has been known for some time that modern materials (synonym for materials consisting mostly of synthetic polymers) tend to burn differently from older...
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About 80% of all fire fatalities in Germany occur because of fires in homes. It has been known for some time that modern materials (synonym for materials consisting mostly of synthetic polymers) tend to burn differently from older materials (synonym for materials consisting mostly of fibrous cellulosic substances) and it has been acknowledged that the amount of combustible plastics in homes has increased significantly over the last decades. To investigate the influence of modern furniture and ventilation conditions of fires in homes, a series of four large-scale tests in two living rooms (LRs) with adjacent rooms (ARs) was performed by BAM and the Frankfurt fire service. Two LRs, one with older furniture and one with modern furniture, were tested twice each. Each test started with the ignition of a paper cushion on an upholstered chair. The influence of modern materials on the fire development was investigated, as well as the influence of the ventilation on the fire development. In all settings, an upholstered chair was the first burning item. Results of the test series show that fires in rooms with modern furniture develop faster than fires in rooms with older furniture. This is true for temperature development in the rooms as well as for smoke production.
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