In performance-based fire safety design of buildings, design fires are assumed based on relatively coarse information of potential combustible objects described by the object name, weight, size and constituent materials. The fire effect is calculated by using assumed design heat release rate (HRR) to judge appropriateness of fire safety provisions. For this purpose, a simple estimation method to estimate design HRR curve (full time history of HRR) was developed. The method is based on summary of available experimental datasets of various combustibles, which were categorized into groups by their names and constituent materials. As a nature of categorized groups, there are two types of variations of HRR characteristics within each category group. One type is that the object size is almost constant within each category group. For this type, HRR curves are simply averaged over the available datasets in order to obtain the characteristic design HRR curve. The method was applied to chairs and sofas. The other type is that the object size varies within each category group. To develop size-dependent HRR curves, rates of fire growth and decay were averaged over datasets in the group. Maximum HRR and total heat release (THR) were correlated with surface area and weight, respectively.The method was applied to Christmas trees. By using the proposed methods, it is possible to establish a simple formula to represent full HRR diagrams by their category names.

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This paper reports a case study of performance-based fire safety design for a large scale underground car-park which was conducted by us; voluntary fire safety engineers of Japan Association of Fire Protection Engineers (JAFPE) for the international conference of Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE). We constructed fundamental fire safety strategy which well take advantage of the characteristics of space arrangement, burning behaviour of cars and supposed occupants. And through analyses of smoke movement, evacuation behaviour and firefighting activity by combination of well-known methods and progressive methods, safety of occupants and fire-fighters are confirmed. We also report the other country's proposals to investigate the possibility of different design approach.