Fire Safety Research Institute Materials and Products database—A resource to support fire modeling

Abstract

For decades, there has been a need in the fire safety science community for a reliable source of material properties and standard fire test data to accurately represent solid materials in fire models. The project described herein has made advancements in experimental data collection and property determination for a multitude of materials commonly encountered in the built environment for the purpose of making the data easily accessible and to elevate the base knowledge and tools available for all model practitioners and investigators. This article includes a description of the experimental methods, procedures, and estimated uncertainty in the measurements that have been adopted to collect the data necessary to describe common materials in the most advanced comprehensive pyrolysis models. A case study is provided in which all the experiments to characterize polycarbonate are described, analytical procedures and derived properties are presented, and validation of the properties against experimental data is presented.