July 2001

BFRL Monthly Highlights

June 2001

July 2001

August 2001

Sept. 2001

PAST Highlights

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BFRL and NFPA Profile Smoke Toxicity Hazard

Smoke toxicity has been a recurring theme for fire safety professionals for over four decades. There continues to be difficulty and controversy in assessing and addressing the contribution of the sublethal effects of smoke in hazard and risk analyses. Under the direction of Richard G. Gann of the Fire Research Division of BFRL, the Fire Protection Research Foundation, NIST, and the National Fire Protection Association have completed the first phase of the “International Study of the Sublethal Effects of Fire Smoke on Survival and Health” to provide scientific information on this topic for public policy makers and product manufacturers. This report estimates the magnitude and impact of sublethal exposures to smoke on the U.S. population, provides the best available, previously published lethal and incapacitating toxic potency values for smoke from commercial products, determines the potential for various size fires to produce smoke yields that could result in sublethal exposures, and provides state- of-the-art information on the production of condensed components of smoke and their evolutionary changes during transport from fire.

CONTACT: Dick Gann
Senior Research Scientist
Integrated Performance Assessment Group
Fire Research Division

BFRL Team Develops Screening Tool for New Fire Suppressants

The Next Generation Fire Suppression Technology Program, led by the BFRL scientist Richard Gann, is the Department of Defense’s research effort to identify alternatives to the commonly used fire suppressant halon 1301 (CF3Br), now known to deplete stratospheric ozone. A key portion of this program is the development of tools to evaluate the fire suppression performance of new candidate extinguishants for use in suppressing in-flight aircraft fires. Under the leadership of William Grosshandler, Chief of the Fire Research Division, a NIST team has completed work on the Transient Application, Recirculating Pool Fire (TARPF) Facility. This device measures the suppression effectiveness of impulsively discharged gases (such as from a pressurized storage bottle or solid propellant gas generator), the impact of a hot surface on continuous suppression, the impact of a recirculating flow; and the impact of a liquid spray. The flow patterns in the device have been modeled to extend the applicability of the experimental results to a variety of conditions prevalent during aircraft fires.

CONTACT: William Grosshandler
Chief
Fire Research Division

The “DuraNet” Workshop on Service Life Design of Concrete Structures

On June 10-12, Geoff Frohnsdorff of BFRL was one of 26 participants in the third and last DuraNet workshop held in Tromso, Norway. The topic of the workshop was “Service Life Design of Concrete Structures—From Theory to Standardization.” It was the final activity stemming from the “Duracrete” project, one of the European Community’s Brite-Euram, multinational research projects; Duracrete, which ended in 2000, was aimed at improving the durability of concrete. The DuraNet was established to help disseminate the results. The purpose of the Tromso workshop was to plan for the development of a probabilistic service life design code for concrete structures, parallel to the structural design code, and to produce recommendations on the format of a standard to be included in the European “Eurocode.” Frohnsdorff was the only participant from outside the European Community. He was invited because he chairs ISO TC59/SC14, Design Life, and because of NIST’s reputation in concrete research. In a talk at the workshop, he reviewed BFRL’s HYPERCON Partnership for High-Performance Concrete Technology program and emphasized its high degree of relevance to the subject of the workshop. At the end of the workshop, it was recommended that, as a first step, a draft of a probabilistic service life standard should be produced in Fib committee 5, and the draft should then be submitted to ISO TC71, Concrete, Reinforced Concrete, and Prestressed Concrete, for standardization. It was also stated that there should be parallel activities in Eurocode 2 and ISO TC71. (The secretariat for ISO TC71 is with the American Concrete Institute.)

CONTACT: Geoff Frohnsdorff
Chief
Building Materials Division

American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Accreditation Program

American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Accreditation Program has accredited 600 laboratories. The BFRL ASHTO Materials Reference Laboratory (AMRL) provides technical support to the AASHTO Accreditation Program that has reached a milestone of having accredited more than 600 laboratories for the testing of construction materials. AMRL is an AASHTO sponsored Research Associate Program at NIST. AASHTO established the accreditation program in 1988 to provide a mechanism to formally recognize the competency of testing laboratories to carry out specific tests on construction materials including soils, asphalt cements, emulsified cements, hot-mix asphalt, aggregates, hydraulic cements, and Portland cement concrete. This program has grown in importance to the construction industry to where it is now the largest accrediter of construction materials testing laboratories in the United States. The accreditation program requires laboratories to participate in the laboratory assessment and proficiency samples programs of AMRL and the Cement and Concrete Reference Laboratory (CCRL). CCRL is also based at NIST as a Research Associate Program under the sponsorship of ASTM.

CONTACT: James Pielert
Research Associate
Construction Materials Group
Building Materials Division

 

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