Experimental and numerical investigation on fire behaviour of foam/fabric composites

Abstract

Upholstered furniture is a major contributor to the fuel load in a fire compartment. Modelling the fire behaviour of upholstered furniture would support performance based fire safety engineering, by allowing the specification of realistic fire scenarios. Modelling upholstered furniture composites in cone calorimeter test conditions is undertaken to validate fundamental assumptions about the fire behaviour of these combinations, without including complexities of a real sized system (e.g. constructional details of mattresses or sofas). Kinetic parameters were taken from micro combustion calorimeter tests and thermal properties were taken from literature and optimised using individual material cone calorimeter tests. A novel methodology of sample preparation was proposed for the cone calorimeter tests in an attempt to increase the one dimensionality of heat transfer. Modelling showed mixed results when compared with experiments. The results also indicated the models incapacity to capture material-material interactions, such as melting of polyester on the top of flexible polyurethane slab or shielding created by cotton residue to protect flexible polyurethane slab from heat exposure