Fire hazards workshop singles out construction materials for more research

by Samantha Ashenhurst | June 8, 2018 3:36 pm

Firefighters from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) look over the end of a controlled test to study the impact of fire on cross-laminated timber (CLT) buildings. CLT has been identified in a new NIST report as needing more flammability research. Photo courtesy NIST — Firefighters from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) look over the end of a controlled test to study the impact of fire on cross-laminated timber (CLT) buildings. CLT has been identified in a new NIST report as needing more flammability research.
*Photo courtesy NIST*

A recent workshop on fire properties of materials concluded cross-laminated timber (CLT) and insulation applied to the exteriors of high-rise buildings are among the materials most in need of urgent research and development. Organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology[2] (NIST), the fire workshop brought together key stakeholders from industry, government, academia, and public laboratories. It also resulted in a new research roadmap[3].

A strategy for reducing the thousands of deaths and injuries and billions of dollars in damage resulting from the more than a million fires each year in the United States is detailed in the roadmap. It provides guidelines for developing science-based approaches to solving fire problems for multiple materials.

The workshop participants agreed the highest priority for future scientific studies and development projects in flammability should go to cross-cutting research approaches that can work against multiple hazards across a wide range of materials and applications. These are:

Real fire behaviors: To understand how the actual use of a product impacts its fire service-life (the fire resistance over the life of a product) and burning behavior;
Engineered fire-safe products: To enable the development of technologies yielding products compliant with flammability regulations for their entire lifetime; and
Bench-scale and computational tools: To develop and use physical testing methods and computer modeling systems that accurately predicts a material’s real-life fire behavior.

The new roadmap strongly recommends these research approaches be applied to the five most critical and urgent fire hazards including:

residential upholstered furniture;
residential buildings in wildland urban interface (WUI) communities;
timber used for multistory buildings;
passenger railway cars; and
insulation applied to the exteriors of high-rise buildings.

“The workshop participants determined these application areas should be prioritized for R&D because reducing flammability in all five should significantly reduce the overall losses from fires in the future,” said NIST materials research engineer Rick Davis[4], one of the authors.

NIST has already begun putting the new roadmap to work, added Davis.

“Based on extensive discussions with our in-house experts after considering the roadmap’s guidelines, we are planning changes in our upcoming year’s research and modifying our long-term strategies.”

More information on NIST’s efforts to reduce flammability is available online[5].

Endnotes:

[Image]: https://www.constructionspecifier.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/NIST.jpg
National Institute of Standards and Technology: https://www.nist.gov/
research roadmap: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/specialpublications/NIST.SP.1220.pdf
Rick Davis: https://www.nist.gov/people/rick-d-davis
online: https://www.nist.gov/el/fire-research-division-73300/flammability-reduction-73304

Source URL: https://www.constructionspecifier.com/fire-hazards-workshop-singles-out-construction-materials-for-more-research/