Fire Tests of Packaged and Palletized Computer Products

Abstract

When an intense fire rage through a major computer distribution and storage warehouse in Northern Europe, it destroyed the complete stock of computer products. The products had been stored in high racks in the unsprinklered building of approximately 157,000 square feet (14,585 square meters). This research demonstrates how and why this fire grew from a single point of origin to a complete burnout of the building. Extensive fire testing of the major commodities stored, including packaged and palletized computer products, is central to this analysis. These tests focused on obtaining heat release rate data to be used as input for enclosure fire models and for algorithms used to predict fire spread between commodity arrays. We've described the fire modeling and fire spread analyses in other publications.^1,2,3 Test results show that all packaged computer pallet loads produce heat release rates consistent with “fast” or “ultra-fast” t² fire growth, as defined in fire models such as FPETOOL⁴ and FAST.⁵