David Purser, CBE, and visiting professor at UCLan, compared the different methods for assessment of fire effluent toxicity and related the results of each to large-scale fire behaviour.
He concluded that the steady state tube furnace (ISO TS 19700) was capable of replicating both well-ventilated and under-ventilated flaming, together with the more expensive fire propagation apparatus (ISO 12136), while the modified smoke chamber and controlled atmosphere cone calorimeter appeared to only replicate well-ventilated combustion, and the conditions in the NF X 70-100 were poorly defined, but possibly intermediate between well-and under-ventilated flaming. He then described how the visual obscuration and irritancy of fire smoke increased people’s escape times, highlighting the need to use incapacitation (when the victim can no longer effect their own escape), and not death, as the endpoint in fire safety prediction, and the value of applying toxicity data to fire engineering calculations.