Modeling of fire exposure in facade fire testing

In this paper a comparative simulation study on three large scale facade testing methods, namely the SP Fire 105, BS 8414 – 1 and the ISO 13785 – 2 methods, is presented. Generally good correspondence between simulations and experimental data has been found, provided that thermal properties of the facade material and heat release rates are known however the correspondence seems to deviate in close proximity of the fire source. Furthermore, a statistical ensemble for evaluating the effects stemming from uncertainty in input data is used. Here, it was found using a statistical ensemble the variability in input data could be assessed and that the variability was smaller in the ISO 13785 – 2 compared to the BS 8414 – 1 method. The heat release rates (HRR) used in the simulations were adopted from measurements except for the ISO method where the information in the standard was used to approximate the HRR. Furthermore, a quantitative similarity between the HRR in the ISO method and the British method was found.