Fire testing laboratories

There are a number of fire test laboratories in the world that can conduct fire tests according to defined standards and on occasion specialized tests. Table 17 provides a list of the test agencies recognized by the petroleum and related industries. 

SINTEF Norwegian Fire Test Laboratory Tronheim, Norway... 

TNO Dutch Fire Test Laboratory Delft, Netherlands... 

Table 16.1 Recognized Fire Testing Laboratories Laboratory Name...

National Tests. It is clearly possible to remove the technical barrier to trade represented by different national fire test procedures, by providing a facility for a manufacturer to conduct the relevant tests once and within his home country, with a guarantee of acceptability of the results by all Member States. This requires laboratories to equip themselves with all the necessary equipment and for an extensive interlaboratory collaboration and calibration procedure to be introduced, which would ensure mutual acceptance of test results. 

EGOLF includes about 20 laboratories and is considered as the precursor of the future European system of fire testing and... 

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) high rise (hydrocarbon) fire test UL 1709, has an average fire temperature of 1093 °C (2,000 °F) after 5 minutes. Therefore unless the an actual fire exposure heat radiation input calculation has been made, either a worst case fire exposure temperature could be assumed or a standard temperature to the limits of UL 1709 could be applied. 

Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL), UL 263. Safety Fire Tests of Building Construction and Materials. Eleventh Edition, UL, Northbrook, IL, 1992. 

The reactive testing laboratories cover fire, dust, kinetics, high energy, and thermodynamics. 

Many blast resistant door manufacturers can offer 3-hour A" and l-t/2-hour "13" fire labels on tow-range and mid-range doors that certify that the construction of the door has been fire tested by an agency such as Underwriters Laboratories. Few... 

ASTM E 1529 Standard Test Methods for Determining Effects of Large Eiydrocarbon Pool Fires on Structural Members and Assemblies and Underwriters Laboratories Inc. 1709 Standard for Rapid Rise Fire Tests of Protection Materials for Structural Steel are two tests which are used to evaluate the performance of structures, equipment, and protective materials to hydrocarbon fires (see Figure 5-17). 

Some manufacturers of internal cooling tower components, specifically fill material and drift eliminators, have products produced from less easily ignited plastic that have been tested by a nationally recognized testing laboratory and determined to have sufficient fire resistance or reduced flame spread ratings that when, and only when, used in an otherwise noncombustible cooling tower, do not require fixed automatic fire protection. 

Taylor and Rinkenbach found that 0.05-gram portions of hexa-methylenetriperoxidediamine, pressed in No. 8 detonator capsules under a pressure of 1000 pounds per square inch and fired by means of a black-powder fuse crimped in the usual way, caused the detonation of ordinary 40% nitroglycerin dynamite and of a gelatin dynamite which had become insensitive after storage of more than a year. The velocity of detonation of HMTD, loaded at a density of 0.88 in a column 0.22 inch in diameter, was found by the U. S. Bureau of Mines Explosives Testing Laboratory to be 4511 meters per second. 

McNaughton, G. C., and Van Kleeck, A., Forest Products Laboratory, R1443. Fire-test methods used in research at Forest Products Laboratory. 

Many tests have been devised to evaluate the fire and flame resistance of surface-treated acoustical fiberboard. The most widely accepted test, recognized by both the building industry and the building code agencies, is the fire-resistance test specified in federal specification (3). Other tests under consideration, but not universally adopted, are the tunnel test of the Underwriters Laboratories, Inc. (11), and the Factory Mutual room burn out test (2). A small scale test that is being employed for plant control and quick finish evaluation is the Class F fire test (12). 

Fire-retardant white paint (system 1), which flashed and flamed intermittently during the second determination, also burned for 20 to 30 seconds during one of the preliminary evaluations. This confirms previous laboratory thermoelectric fire test rein FIRE RETARDANT PAINTS ... 

UL Rapid rise fire tests of protection materials for structural steel, UL 1709, 1994, Underwriter Laboratories. 

Furniture calorimeters were developed in the 1980s in several laboratories to obtain this kind of data.70 71 The first furniture calorimeter test standard was published in 1987 in the Nordic countries as NT Fire 032. Furniture calorimeter test standards have been developed by ASTM for chairs, mattresses, and stacked chairs. The corresponding designations are ASTM E 1537, ASTM E 1590, and ASTM E 1822, respectively. The California Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation (CBHFTI) developed California Technical Bulletins (CAL TB) 133 and 603. These documents describe fire test procedures to qualify seating furniture and mattresses, respectively, for use in public occupancies in California. CAL TB 603 has been superseded by the Federal CPSC standard 16 CFR 1633. The primary difference between the various chair and mattress tests is the ignition source. 

The validity of a bench-scale study of fire behavior is dependent on how it translates to the real scale. In general, real scale fires (both laboratory tests and unwanted fires) are poorly defined, and exhibit high sensitivity to a number of uncontrolled variables. 

In recent years, a new fire-test instrument was developed the pyrolysis combustion flow calorimeter (PCFC) or microcalorimeter.209 210 This instrument (Figure 21.17) was developed by Richard Lyon and his coworkers at the FAA laboratories. It enables the determination of parameters such as specific heat release rate (W/g), heat of combustion (J/g), and ignition temperature (°K), to be quickly determined from very small (1-50 mg) test specimens. The technique has been standardized by ASTM as ASTM D 7309. Data from the PCFC has been shown to be capable of being correlated... 

Key UL Fire Test Standards (Underwriters Laboratories Inc., 333 Pfingsten Road, Northbrook, IL 60062-2096) ... 

UL 1820, Standard for Safety Fire Test of Pneumatic Tubing for Flame and Smoke Characteristics, Underwriters Laboratories, Northbrook, IL. 

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