Experimental Study on Vertical Wooden Façade Combustion

This work presents the summarized results based on eight large-scale tests carried out to study the fire behaviour of vertical wooden façade combustion. The main purpose of these tests is to get some information on fire spread along a combustible façade in order to assess the ability of numerical codes to simulate flame propagation. If many researches on combustible façades exist, it is difficult to find academic configurations with a large instrumentation and consequently with a large database.Generally, these studies focus on observations concerning fire behaviour of complex façades, and for most of them, instrumentation consist to measure the temperature at different levels.During the eight large-scale tests have been measured: the temperatures in the fire room, on the façade and in front of it at different levels, the mass loss of wood cribs used as fuel in the room fire as well as the components of combustion gases.The first two tests were made without any combustible cladding on the calcium silicate board in order to measure the temperature of an inert façade. The façade of the other tests were composed of a cladding of 18 mm thick plywood mounted directly onto the calcium silicate board. In these tests, two different species of wood are used, Birch Wood and Okoumé (African Wood). The aim was to observe the influence of the speeches with different densities on flame propagation. In addition to the numerous temperature measurements mentioned above, measurements of residual claddings thickness were made. Thus, the present research tries to understand the influence of the thermal stress level along the façade to the wood-burning rate through the wall.