Factory Mutual Corner Test

Factory Mutual Corner Test. This is a large-scale comer test used to test building products (18—20). The test rig consists of three sides of a cube. The two walls are 15.24 and 11.58 m by 7.62 m tall. The ceiling is 9.14 x 15.24 m. The product to be tested is mounted on the walls and ceilings ia a manner consistent with the iatended use. The fire source is a 340 kg stack of wood pallets located ia the corner. In order to pass the test, no flame can propagate to any extremity of the walls or ceiling. The Factory Mutual flammabiHty apparatus is proposed to replace this test for certain appHcations (21). 

Radiant panel test for flame spread Factory mutual calorimeter test UL and FM corner wall tests Full-room burnouts— FM, UL ASTM E162... 

Factory Mutual provides loss prevention data sheets that explain how to protect buildings from wind damage. Pressure coefficients that define increased uplift at corners and edges adjust the calculated uplift pressures. A laboratory uplift pressure test rates roofing assemblies. An uplift pressure of 2.9 kPa (0.42 psi) must be withstood under FM conditions to meet the Class 1-60 requirements. The FM approval guide is revised aimuaHy (37). 

Factory Mutual Room Burn Out Test. This method involves the use of a special test room. The particular one referred to is located at Factory Mutual Laboratories, Norwood, Mass. It is 14 x 20 feet in area and 12 feet high, constructed of spruce studs and roof joists, with a floor of Douglas fir sheathing on spruce runners laid on a concrete floor underneath. The interior surfaces of walls and ceiling are covered with 1/4 inch soft asbestos board. Thermocouples are located so as to record temperatures in the corners and center of the room at both the ceiling and breathing levels. 

The Factory Mutual 25-ft Corner Tesf is used in the United States for examination of the fire spread on wall and ceiling coverings in a 15mxl2m room with height of 7.5 m after exposure to the fire of a 350 kg pile of wood. This kind of test is not very different from the full-scale fire tests to be discussed in Section 3.3. 

It has proved difficult to determine any correlation between the test result of the various national procedures [53]. Because of this, the experts of TC92 of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) have undertaken the development of a test procedure to characterise independently ignitability, flame spread, rates of heat release, and other fire-related parameters [54-56]. Worldwide efforts continue to correlate laboratory tests to real-life fires [57]. Examples of such programmes are the corner test programme carried out by Factory Mutual and the corrugated metal tool deck [58] trials [59, 60] carried out by TNO. The corner test has been used to determine the fire behaviour of rigid foam materials when exposed to severe wood crib fire. 

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