Correlation between laboratory- and real-scale fire analyses

Predicting the fire behavior of a material at a large scale from laboratory micro- or small-scale tests is challenging because many coupled phenomena are involved, whose magnitude depends on the fire scenario. The first part of this chapter briefly lists some reasons for which there is usually no simple correlation between fire performances at different scales. Three case studies are proposed to illustrate the issues related to the upscaling. The first one is focused on one of the most studied polymers, namely poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). The second considers the specific case of cable tray fires. The last one is related to wildfires.