Open Collections

Description

Various research groups have conducted numerous mass timber compartment fire tests to validate the safety of mass timber as a structural material. Each test often generates gigabytes of measurement data. Unfortunately, the in-depth temperature measurements have always been underutilized. The temperature-time-location profiles are not widely shared in a usable format: they are often available only as plots and summary variables, such as charring rates, in the published literature. Moreover, due to significant variations in the experimental designs used by different research groups, it is challenging to make meaningful comparisons between the thermal profiles developed within structural members in dissimilar compartment configurations across different experimental campaigns. These roadblocks have long discouraged meta-analyses and other attempts to collate and analyze solid temperature data across different campaigns.

This gap is addressed by introducing the Fire Research Catalogue of Mass Timber Compartment Tests (FIRECAT). This public, unified, and searchable relational database catalogues the in-depth temperature profiles developed in structural timber. In addition to the temperature-time-location data, the database expresses test metadata with over 110 physical variables at the compartment and member levels, which are believed to influence the gas dynamics and the thermal response of the timber within the compartment.

The FIRECAT database and its interactive public dashboard will serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners to benchmark structural thermal models for mass timber, perform meta-analyses, and develop scientific machine learning models for fire design.

The interactive dashboard based on the latest version of FIRECAT is available here.

If you wish to contribute your data to FIRECAT, kindly complete the provided input template and return it to the authors.