The wide variety in country specific fire codes can dramatically affect the fire safety of home furnishings resulting in more or less escape time from structure fires. This study uses three replicates of identical rooms for each of the countries tested (France, United Kingdom, US) to increase reliability of data for a more reliable comparison. France and the US rely on smolder only furniture flammability standards while the United Kingdom relies on a combination of smolder and open flame ignition test. Each test room contained a 3 cushion couch, chair and flat panel television of identical models/manufacturers purchased from the respective countries. Additionally, each room was fitted with an identical coffee table, end table, curtain, and bookcase obtained from Walmart in the United States and 12 kg of books. All rooms were meticulously setup to ensure comparability of results. Flat panel televisions were purchased from electronic stores in the three countries, all were 1.4 m (55 inch) Samsung FPD LED models of as similar design as possible in the markets purchased. The couches and chairs were the same Ektorp furniture line of identical color purchased from Ikea. All FPD TVs and furniture appeared to be identical. All room burns were conducted in a standard ISO 9705 room. Heat release was measured by oxygen consumption calorimetry and smoke development by light dispersion in the ventilation duct. Acute toxicity measurements were made using FTIR at two collection points, the door way and at crawling height in the center of the room. Other smoke constituents were measured for concentration of PAH, VOC, SVOCs and chlorinated and brominated dioxins and furans. Two separate collection events were performed, before and after white smoke transitioned to black smoke. The time to transition from white to black smoke for the British furnishings was five times as long as that observed for the French and US models. The same is true of the time to flashover. The average pHHR for the British rooms was 200 KW less than the US and 400 KW less than the French rooms. All rooms had pHHR between 2.5 MW and 3.3 MW. Total smoke produced for the British rooms was half that of the French and US and the Peak Smoke was delayed for the British rooms by approximately 12 min. This study illustrated that the UK standard does provide a significantly better performance for an identical size and shaped couch based on time to pHHR, pHHR, time to peak smoke, and total smoke. In addition, the chemical composition of the smoke generated in the room burns featuring UK furniture were less

The fire safety assessment procedure of ships and offshore structures can be briefly described as a procedure for assessing safety by defining fire loads according to accident scenarios and analyzing their effects on the structure. In general, safety is reviewed via the temperature criteria of the structures under fire loads, and it is assessed in more detail via thermal-structural analysis, which combines fire simulation-heat transfer analysis with structural analysis in the design stage. Therefore, the accuracy of the thermal-structural analysis is crucial for reliable fire safety assessment, and the most applied method for validating the accuracy is to compare with the experimental results.Although fire experiments have been conducted by many researchers to analyze the characteristics of flames and heat transfer of steel members, constructing the temperature-dependent material property data, verifying the fire resistance performance of the structure itself, developing and validating numerical models, including other experiments have been conducted from the perspective of fluids with a primary focus on measuring gas and steel surface temperatures. On the other hand, fire experiments from the perspective of structure, which measure the displacement of a structure under fire load, were conducted mainly in limited environments such as inside a furnace because it was difficult to measure displacement in a high-temperature environment with a mixture of flames and smoke, as well as controlling the heat of the fire source. In addition, fire experiments conducted in open space have been seldom carried out. The British Steel Corporation (BSC) has summarized standard fire experiment results for structures such as steel beams and columns (Wainman and Kirby, 1988;Wainman et al., 1990). Cong conducted a furnace fire experiment on an I-beam, which is widely used as structural members for offshore structures, under mechanical loads to measure the steel surface temperature and vertical displacement. The vertical displacement was then measured by linear variable differential transformers (LVDTs) installed on top of the specimen exposed to the exterior parts of the furnace (Cong et al., 2005). The results obtained from this experiment have been widely used by other researchers to develop numerical analysis techniques (Kim, 2014;Kim et al., 2017).In addition to steel, fire experiments have also been conducted on sandwich panel structures made of fiber-reinforced plastic (FRP)

Modern polymer bonded explosives (PBX) are often characterized by a sensitive response to external thermomechanical insult that in some cases lead to accidental detonation. Current strategies for desensitizing PBXs come at the expense of a significant reduction in performance. A possible method for desensitizing PBX without adverse performance effects is the multifunctional tailoring of mechanical properties through strategic incorporation of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) directly into the binder phase. In this work, a fabrication method is presented that produces polymer bonded simulants (PBS) of PBX that incorporate MWCNTs into the binder phase, hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB). These materials were characterized via microscopy and unconfined quasi-static compression testing to determine the effects of MWCNTs. Quasi-static compression showed evidence of a MWCNT induced structural skeleton effect that provided the binder with an increased strength, load transfer, and a greater ability to resist strain localizations prior to failure. These enhancements demonstrate the potential of using MWCNTs to enhance energetic materials.

We study the dynamics of Newtonian fluids subject to complex pressure gradients within bent oscillating nanotubes. Pressure gradients with four different purely oscillatory time profiles are explored by theoretical means, in order to unveil the mechanism of interaction between the characteristic time of tube vibration and the multiple characteristic times involved in the complex pressure signal. We find out that all the characteristic times of the system are mixed as a consequence of the nonlinear fluid-tube coupling caused by Coriolis force, which is induced by the local nanotube rotation and is distinctive of micro- and nanometric confinements subject to vibration. Our computations predict a vast range of resonances, not only the ones expected when the magnitude of pressure frequency is close to the magnitude of tube frequency, but also resonances where the pressure frequency is considerably lower than the tube frequency. These resonances could be exploited to obtain controllable combined oscillatory and net flow rates, even when the actuator's frequencies cannot reach the tube vibration frequencies. Our findings provide a theoretical framework for future applications in generation of complex oscillatory and net flow rates with a single actuator, using relatively low instrumentation.