New research shows how product fire standards impact the severity of room content fires. For the research, rooms were constructed to simulate a living area commonly involved in a house fire. The simulated rooms demonstrate that differences among country-specific fire codes in real-world scenarios can dramatically affect overall fire conditions, including ignition development, smoke generation and quality, escape time, and time available for emergency personnel response.
The time to flashover of furnishings from the U.K. room was delayed more than 13 to 17 minutes in comparison to countries with less protective fire safety standards. In addition, the development of the black smoke is significantly delayed by the use of flame retardants. Learn More
Time to Max Smoke and Time to Flash Over (Demonstrating Escape Time) from Great Britain/United Kingdom, France, and U.S. Combustions. (2019 data)
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 used three replicates of identical rooms for each of the countries tested (France, United Kingdom, US). The United Kingdom has what is probably the most demanding fire standard for furniture in the world.1Study Citation: Blais, Matthew S., Karen Carpenter, and Kyle Fernandez. “Comparative Room Burn Study of Furnished Rooms from the United Kingdom, France and the United States.” Fire Technology (2019): 1-26.
