Assessment of fire behaviour of high‐speed trains' interior materials: small‐scale and full‐scale fire tests

Abstract

SUMMARY The development of fire‐safety measures for high‐speed passenger trains has been focused on preventing fire initiation or delaying fire growth and spread through small‐scale tests of the materials used in trains. However, new fire‐safety approaches for trains consider a systemic approach. This approach considers numerous global factors that influence fire dynamics, such as the influence of vehicle design, selection of materials, and active and passive protection systems installed. In the present paper, the results of small‐scale and full‐scale tests carried out on the new generation of high‐speed trains operating in Spain are presented. This rolling stock is classified as category B according to the Technical Specification for Interoperability and Operation Category 3 according to EN 45545–1. The results confirmed good fire behaviour using both approaches (small and full‐scale tests). Additionally, several analyses have been performed, including an analysis of the quality of materials used for making different components of the passenger compartment and the influence of ignition source position on fire development. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A review of fire growth and fully developed fires in railcars

“…In a follow‐on study, Capote et al compared cone calorimeter test data of wall, ceiling, and seat materials with that measured in the previous study by NIST . A large‐scale test inside a portion of an actual railcar was performed using a backpack as an ignition source (35–45 kW fire) with the location of the source changed in the 4 tests conducted.…”

“…In a follow-on study, Capote et al 30 researchers explored the size of the ignition source required to cause the railcar to reach flashover as well as the contribution of passenger personal items to causing flashover. With a sufficiently large initiating fire (300-400 kW), the presence of the passenger personal items resulted in a fire that caused the railcar section to reach flashover producing a 3.2-MW fire.…”

A discussion on design fires for high-speed railway train cars

“…A detailed review [10] of rail fire performance standards, large train fire incidents, recent experiments on flashover train fires, surveys of design fires used in the past and existing design fire estimation methods were reported. Updated works on train car fires [11][12][13][14][15][16][17] are summarized. Design fire is a crucial and decisive parameter to predict room fire development in performance-based design on fire safety provisions.…”

Innovations for smoke management in passenger trains

“…These research programmes involved small-, medium- and real-scale fire tests, but also, the combination of small-scale and full-scale test has been used to analyse the fire behaviour of interior materials of high-speed trains. 5 In addition, the influence of the ignition source location in different compartment sizes and configurations has been analysed by Parkes and Fleischmann, 6 and it has been found that these parameters significantly influence fire development.…”