An experimental evaluation of toxic gas emissions from vehicle fires

Publication date: Available online 1 February 2018
Source:Fire Safety Journal
Author(s): Benjamin Truchot, Fabien Fouillen, Serge Collet
Improving fire modelling is a key issue to design efficient safety measures for a safe people evacuation in case of fire. Such an analysis should consider the different impacts of fire on people as temperature, visibility but also toxicity. Most of the standard curves used in tunnel fire studies are based on quite old fire tests without any detailed toxic gas qualification. Very few fire tests were published in that way. Based on those few tests, some standard fire emission factors are available in the literature. The objective of this paper is to review those emission factors considering the different toxic species and dealing with using recent cars. A method is then proposed to define a carbon monoxide equivalent emission factor to consider the different species through their specific threshold. Such an approach can be easily introduced into fire codes.To meet this objective, two series of tests were performed. The first concerns individual combustible materials of cars as plastics and tyres. The second focusses on full car burning tests including a detailed smoke analysis. Those two series of tests lead to an analysis of the smoke toxicity and a comparison of emission factors with standard ones.



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