NEWS Fire safety testing regime ‘requires urgent review’
TESTING RESEARCH undertaken by the Association of British Insurers (ABI) and the Fire Protection Association (FPA) has ‘exposed the utter inadequacy’ of current building material fire safety tests. The ABI reported on the test
programme undertaken by the FPA on its behalf, with the ‘carefully controlled’ experiments aiming to create ‘more realistic building conditions than those in which the standard tests are done’, in order to ‘measure what difference these factors could make in the event of a fire’. It stated that the research ‘has exposed the utter inadequacy’ of the current tests used ‘to check the fire safety of building materials’. In the testing programme,
the FPA studied ‘real-life factors overlooked by the official testing regime’, including test fires that are ‘only made up of wood’, when modern blazes feature ‘around 20%’ plastic. It also looked at how cladding materials ‘are sometimes tested as a sealed unit, whereas when fitted on a building they often include gaps, and cover a far more extensive area’. Finally, the test programme analysed fires where ‘materials tested will be in manufacturer condition, but during their actual use will often be pierced by things such as vents or ducts’. When submitting to Dame Hackitt’s review of building regulations and fire safety, the ABI called for an ‘end to the use of all but non-combustible materials in construction’, alongside a ‘reformed testing regime that replicates real world conditions to provide genuine evidence of how materials perform in a fire’. From its perspective, its test
programme’s results ‘all reinforce the importance of urgent reform’, with the first test creating two fires ‘with the same energy content, one purely built out of wood, the other containing 20% plastic’. Flames created by the latter
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had a flame length ‘around 1 metre longer’ than the wooden fire, while its temperatures were 100 degrees hotter ‘and still increasing’ when it had to be extinguished because it was ‘exceeding lab safety conditions’. This test’s implications were
that ‘as well as the ability of the fire containing plastic to spread faster and create higher temperatures, building materials such as aluminium lose a lot of their strength at higher temperatures’, with ‘a lot of cladding’, including that used on Grenfell Tower, ‘made up of aluminium composite panels’. The second test saw fires
started at the bottom of three columns: one with no cladding or cover, another with cladding fitted ‘to create a void but with sealed edges and ends’, and another clad with a void, ‘leaky sides and some ventilation at the top and bottom’.
JUNE 2018
www.frmjournal.com
Fire climbed 1.5m up the
first ‘before burning out and self-extinguishing’; the second saw fire climb a similar distance ‘before it ran out of oxygen and self-extinguished’, and the third having ‘rapidly caught fire up the entire 6 metre height of the testing column’.
Implications of this included
that the ‘availability of oxygen makes a massive difference to how materials respond to fire’, with well ventilated voids behind cladding seeing the ‘rate at which fire spreads’ potentially ‘greatly increased by a chimney effect’. Any tests restricting availability of oxygen ‘in a way that doesn’t happen on a full scale building will not be able to correctly assess how the materials will behave in practice’. The final test meanwhile saw a section of wall and cladding set up with a plastic vent installed, as vents are a
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