Application of Reduced-scale Model Experiments to the Fire Safety Research of Buildings

Abstract

One of the dominant scaling parameter in the fire safety research, Q^*, represents a Froude number of natural convection induced by a fire. Q^* has been used to model behavior of various fire-related phenomena including flame height of a turbulent diffusion flame, excess temperature and velocity of a fire plume and a ceiling jet, and even upper layer temperature of a fire room. In this article, examples of Froude modeling in reduced-scale experiments are overviewed. These include an investigation of the King's Cross Station Fire in 1987, a smoke flow experiment in the Himeji-jo castle, and an investigation of fire behavior of 96th floor of World Trade Center Tower 1 collapse in 2001.