To perform fire engineering analysis, data on how an object or group of objects burn
is almost always needed. This data should be collected and stored in a logical and
complete fashion to allow for meaningful analysis later. This thesis details the design
of a new fire test Data Base Management System (DBMS) termed UCFIRE which
was built to overcome the limitations of existing fire test DBMS and was based
primarily on the FDMS 2.0 and FIREBASEXML specifications. The UCFIRE DBMS
is currently the most comprehensive and extensible DBMS available in the fire
engineering community and can store the following test types: Cone Calorimeter,
Furniture Calorimeter, Room/Corner Test, LIFT and Ignitability Apparatus Tests.
Any data reduction which is performed on this fire test data should be done in an
entirely mechanistic fashion rather than rely on human intuition which is subjective.
Currently no other DBMS allows for the semi-automation of the data reduction
process. A number of pertinent data reduction algorithms were investigated and
incorporated into the UCFIRE DBMS. An ASP.NET Web Service (WEBFIRE) was
built to reduce the bandwidth required to exchange fire test information between the
UCFIRE DBMS and a UCFIRE document stored on a web server.
A number of Mass Loss Rate (MLR) algorithms were investigated and it was found
that the Savitzky-Golay filtering algorithm offered the best performance. This
algorithm had to be further modified to autonomously filter other noisy events that
occurred during the fire tests. This algorithm was then evaluated on test data from
exemplar Furniture Calorimeter and Cone Calorimeter tests.
The LIFT test standard (ASTM E 1321-97a) requires its ignition and flame spread
data to be scrutinised but does not state how to do this. To meet these requirements
the fundamentals of linear regression were reviewed and an algorithm to
mechanistically scrutinise ignition and flame spread data was developed. This
algorithm seemed to produce reasonable results when used on exemplar ignition and
flame spread test data.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/1578 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Tobeck, Daniel |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Civil Engineering |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Daniel Tobeck, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
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