Cable-testing in fires

During the 1960s and early 1970s, many laboratory scale tests were developed to indicate the fire performance of cables. Although it has become increasingly apparent that real fires cannot be reproduced by small-scale tests it has been recognised that they have a part to play in the overall assessment of the total fire hazard in a real fire situation. A number of these tests have now been developed and issued as either international specifications or reports (IEC). The author describes these tests which address specific fire hazards such as propagation, smoke emission, acid gas emission and fire resistance. Whilst the assessment of the overall fire hazard may utilise the product properties as determined by these laboratory tests, the interpretation of the results may still pose additional technical problems