Citation

Zhang C, Choe L, Gross J, Ramesh S, Bundy M. Fire Technol. 2017; 53(4): 1535-1554.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10694-016-0646-7

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper reports the design and results of a thermal test on heating of a 6 m long steel W beam subjected to a localized fire conducted at the National Fire Research Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. A engineering approach was proposed to determine the heat release rate of the test fire. By the approach, a recently developed simple fire model was first used to approximately calculate the heat release rate and then a sophisticated model was used to check/refine the calculation. The concept of adiabatic surface temperature was used in the sophisticated model to represent the thermal boundary conditions at exposed surfaces in fire. The proposed approach successfully predicted the critical value of heat release rate of 500 kW to reach a target temperature of 500∘C500∘C500^{circ }hbox {C} in the test specimen. A calibration test was also conducted to understand the difference between the predicted and measured steel temperatures in the investigated test, and found that the sophisticated model over-predict the adiabatic surface temperatures which would contribute to the over-prediction of the steel temperatures. The error of the predicted maximum steel temperature in the test specimen was within 10%. The study reported here is not necessarily a validation of the sophisticated model, rather the study provides a successful case study using current knowledge and tools to design realistic and controlled fire tests.

Language: en