Overview

Predictions of compartment fire temperature and duration are compared to two sets of data. The first set of data is from 321 experiments conducted under the auspices of CIB. ^[48] See the section entitled CIB beginning on page 31 for more information on these experiments. The compartments in these experiments were roughly cubic, although some of the compartments had aspect ratios (length to width) of or 2.

In these experiments, the stage of fully developed burning was defined as the period from when the mass of fuel was between 80% and 30% of the original, unburned fuel mass. Average temperatures during the period of fully developed burning from these experiments were presented as a function of

Average burning rate data during the fully developed stage was presented as as a function . Data was also included where the average burning rate during the fully developed burning stage was presented in tables of as a function of .

Although both the CIB report ^[48] and the Cardington data ^[103] show that the aspect ratio of a compartment can influence the burning rate for fully developed, ventilation-limited fires, most predictive methods do not explicitly account for this effect. Therefore, predictive methods that do not account for compartment aspect ratio were evaluated using the CIB burning rate data, which was normalized by the area and square root of the height of the ventilation opening, but not by the square root of the ratio of compartment depth...