Development of standards for assessment of fire effluent toxicity and their application to cable installations

Abstract

Over the past 5 years there has been considerable progress within ISO TC92, SC3 the subcommittee dealing with fire threat to people and the environment. Methods of quantifying the yield of product fire effluents have been defined and interpretive documents to aid the use of this data established. ISO 13571:2007 describes the calculation of safe escape time using concentrations of asphyxiant and irritant gases for performance based design, which will cause incapacitation and thus prevent escape. This extends the earlier ISO 13344 by including heat, smoke and irritants into account together with toxicity which estimated the concentrations resulting in death. Within Europe the lead by the cable industry to include acidity testing into de facto cable application standards has been recognised by the European Union and these requirements will now form an optional additional classification under the Construction Products Directive (CPD).