An experimental study on fire resistance of medical modular block

Fire performance and fire safety of high-rise buildings have become major concerns after the disasters of World Trade Center in the U.S. in 2001 and Windsor tower in Spain in 2005. Performance based design (PBD) approaches have been considered as a better method for fire resistance design of structures because it is capable of incorporating test results of most recent fire resistance technologies. However, there is a difficulty to evaluate fireproof performance of large structures, which have multiple structural members such as columns, slabs, and walls. The difficulty is mainly due to the limitation in the testing equipment, such as size of furnace that can be used to carry out fire tests with existing criteria like ISO 834, BS 476, and KS F 2257. In the present research, a large scale calorie meter (10 MW) was used to conduct three full scale fire tests on medical modular blocks. Average fire load of 13.99 $kg/m^2$ was used in the first test. In the second test, the weighting coefficient of 3.5 (the fire load of 50 $kg/m^2$) was used to simulate the worst fire scenario. The flashover of the medical modular block occurred at 62 minutes in the first test and 12 minutes in the second test. The heat resistance capacity of the external wall, the temperatures and deformations of the structural members satisfied the requirements of fire resistance performance of 90 minutes burning period. The total heat loads and the heat values for each test are calculated by theoretical equations. The duration of burning was predicted. The predicted results were compared with the test results, and they agree quite well.