Experimental Assessment of Emission Factors from Fires in the Built Environment Including Scaling Effects

Concern for the health of the natural environment is growing as humanpopulation grows. Recently, renewed attention has been given to the environmentalimpact of fires and the fire implications of sustainability choices made in the builtenvironment. To properly understand the environmental impact of fires, however, itis crucial that we can estimate fire emissions. This paper explores the concept of fireemissions and emission factors and investigates the potential to use small scale testingto develop emission factors for fire emissions. The findings show that there is apotential to use dynamic tests such as the cone calorimeter (CC, ISO 5660) and firepropagation apparatus (FPA, ISO 12136) to develop emission factors to estimate lar-ger scale fire emissions, at least for CO and CO2emissions. While there is a spread ofdata from between the CC or FPA and the medium scale tests, this is of the sameorder or less than the spread between the two small scale tests. The spread in emis-sion factor values from the various tests is smaller for CO2than for CO and greatestfor small CO-emission factors (