Kicking Off Third Study on Fire Service Ventilation
To kick off the $1 million U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant project to study the effectiveness of positive pressure ventilation during fire attack in single-family homes incorporating modern construction practices, UL Research Institutes' Fire Safety Research Institute hosted the first of three technical panel meetings. The technical panel meeting held at UL’s Northbrook, IL, campus brought together technical panel members from across the U.S., Canada, and Europe. A total of 26 members from four countries with more than 500 years of combined fire service experience volunteered their time and knowledge to help in this cutting-edge research. The full-day meeting introduced the panel members who discussed the goals of the grant project, planned full-scale burn experiments, and toured UL’s large-scale fire facility.
Positive pressure ventilation is a fire service tactic in which high-speed fans are used to pressurize a house involved in fire with the intent to control the flow of combustion products and heat within an enclosure. Technical meeting attendees provided the Fire Safety Research Institute with valuable insight into how fire service tactics are being used throughout the world and discussed areas where additional data and knowledge are needed to better understand their uses and benefits. Almost all panel members echoed the need to identify the most effective uses and contraindications for PPV.
The full-scale tests will compare the effectiveness of PPV in 1,200-square-foot, single-story ranch homes reflecting the construction of the late 1960s and early 1970s with the 3,200-square-foot, two-story open floor plan homes that dominate today’s new home construction. A total of 23 experiments are planned to evaluate how PPV affects fire dynamics in modern homes. The testing results will be published in the final DHS report and compiled into an online training course for the fire service.
The Effectiveness of Positive Pressure Ventilation is the third DHS grant awarded to the Fire Safety Research Institute under the Assistance to Firefighter Grant Program to study fire service ventilation. In 2010, we published a report on the Impact of Ventilation on Fire Behavior in Legacy and Contemporary Residential Construction, followed in 2013 with the Effectiveness of Fire Service Vertical Ventilation and Suppression Tactics in Single Family Homes project. Although PPV has been studied in high-rise and fire-resistant structures, this project marks the first major research into PPV for single-family homes.
