Fire Experiment Inside a Very Large and Open-Plan Compartment: x-ONE

Abstract The traditional design fires commonly considered in structural fire engineering, like the standard and Eurocode parametric fires, were developed several decades ago based on experimental compartments smaller than 100 m 2 floor area. These experiments led to inherent assumption of flashover that temperatures burning conditions are uniform whole compartment, regardless its size. However, modern office buildings often have much larger open-plan areas (e.g. Shard London has a area 1600 ) where non-uniform likely occur. This paper presents observations from large-scale experiment x-ONE conducted inside concrete farm building Poland. objective was capture experimentally natural large open plan compartment. With an 380 , is largest compartment carried out date. ignited at one end allowed spread across continuous wood crib (fuel load ~ 370 MJ/m ). A travelling with clear leading trailing edges observed spreading along 29 length. flame rate not constant but accelerated time 3 mm/s 167 resulting gradually changing travelled burned far 25 min after ignition. Flashover observed. thermocouples cameras installed path show near-field far-field regions, indicating highly spatial within dynamics during this completely different reported small scale previous literature assumptions made for design. highlights need further research understand continue improving safe buildings.