A study was undertaken to evaluate the fire performance of composite materials using the cone calorimeter as the bench-scale method of test simulating the thermal irradiance from fires of various magnitudes. Five parameters were 'derived from the calorimetry measurements to characterize the ignitability and flammability of the composite materials.

A modified cone calorimeter with an enclosure has been developed for measuring the yield of combustion products including CO and smoke under vitiated conditions. The CO yields of methane, propane, PMMA, ABS, polyethylene, and Douglas fir are found to increase by at least a factor of two as the oxygen concentration is decreased from 21% to 14%, while the smoke yields are found to be insensitive to vitiation for the solid materials (less than 30% change).Results for air vitiated separately by nitrogen and by carbon dioxide suggest that the CO yield for a given fuel in a free burn is mainly controlled by the flame temperature. For ambient conditions, the CO yields for the solid samples are about a factor of 2.3 smaller than the smoke yields for all the solid materials studied.

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Many fires occur in ambient atmospheric conditions. To investigate certain types of fires, however, it is necessary to consider combustion where the oxidizer is not 21% oxygen/79% nitrogen. The Cone Calorimeter (ASTM E 1354, IS0 DIS 5660) has recently become the tool of choice for studying the fire properties of products and materials. Its standard use involves burning specimens with room air being drawn in for combustion. To facilitate studying fires involving different atmospheres, a special version of the Cone Calorimeter was designed. This unit allows controlled combustion atmospheres to be created by the use of bottled or piped gases. To make such operation feasible, a large number of design details of the standard calorimeter had to be modified. This paper describes the background for these changes and provides an explanation of how the controlled-atmospheres unit is operated.