Small scale measurement of artificial smoke optical properties

For the assessment of the quality and behavior of building materials in the case of fire, standard testing methods which classify these products based on their performance have been developed. This testing covers among other parameters the smoke emission of the materials in case of fire. The testing methods require various quantities of the products in order to provide accurate results, hence they can rarely be used in the research and development phase of a product. Standard tests that are used to classify building materials, usually employ the principle of light intensity attenuation for the determination of information regarding the smoke emission of the product. This paper presents the 1:10 and 1:20 scale reduction of an experiment used to determine the optical properties of artificially generated smoke based on the same principle of light attenuation. The scale reduction was carried out by means of proportionally reducing each of the test compartment dimensions and the amount of smoke fluid used. For the assessment of the scale reduction accuracy, the extinction area of smoke, which is a parameter that can correlate the light intensity values measured in the different experimental scales was used as a benchmark.