37º IAHS World Congress on Housing: - Universidad de Cantabria

XXXVII <strong>IAHS</strong><strong>World</strong> <strong>Congress</strong> on HousingOctober 26 – 29, 2010, Santander, SpainCODE: 419FIRE REACTION CHARACTERIZATION OFCONSTRUCTION MATERIALS USING FIRE TESTS ANDFIRE MODELSJ. A. Capote, D. Alvear, O. V. Abreu, M. Lázaro and E. PuenteGrupo GIDAI – Seguridad contra Incendios – Investigación y TecnologíaUniversidad de Cantabria (España)Email: capotej@unican.es, alveard@unican.es, abreuo@unican.es, lazarom@unican.es, puentee@unican.esKey words: fire reaction, ignition properties, small scale fire test, fire computer modeling, geneticalgorithms.AbstractThe development of new Fire Safety Regulations in the EU aims to obtain a commonregulation between the country members. These regulations including new tests based on themeasure and the analysis of Heat Release Rate as useful parameter to characterize the ignitionof materials.Fire Computer Models have become an interesting tool to study the fire behavior of materials.With these models, and a suitable set of parameters that define the features of materials,modeling of the fire response of material with a known accuracy can be made. Further, thisprocedure allows establishing both the prediction of the results in simulated scenarios as theestablishment of the technical criteria to the material properties that will be include in thedesign phase of the material.This study is based on the development of a methodology that has got two milestones, thetheoretical analysis and the computational simulations. First, Cone Calorimeter [1] tests werecarried out at different irradiance levels in order to determine both the thermal inertia as theignition temperature of material by the Janssens’ procedure [2]. Next, the computationalmodel of the “Material System” which includes both the physical-chemical properties(density, conductivity and so on) as the fire reaction parameters (chemical chain scheme,activation energies and so on) was performed. There was used the model ‘Fire DynamicsSimulator (FDS)’ developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).The small scale test Thermal Gravimetric Analysis (TGA) and computational parameteroptimization (evolutionary algorithms) was used to determine the parameters of the “MaterialSystem” characterization.37º <strong>IAHS</strong> <strong>World</strong> <strong>Congress</strong> On Housing Science 209