Assessing Fire Resistance of Timber Doorsets

Currently the fire resistance of any timber door assembly can only be established by submitting a prototype construction to the National, European or International fire resistance test procedure for doors, e.g. (NT-method), EN1634-1, ISO 3008. This does not only apply to the basic design, but it applies to any variation in size, mode of operation, configuration, building hardware and any glazing. In practice even assessments of small changes to the design of a door are discouraged by the commercial testi ng institutes; preferring testing of all design/construction changes. Testing is, however, a non-preferred method of characterising the performance of doors for the following reasons: * the fire resistance test has a very low level of reproducibility and repeatability; * the fire resistance test is environmentally bad due to the energy used, the emission of ?green house? gases, and the potential release of trace chemicals; * timber, whilst being highly predictable in fire with respect to some characteris tics, a timber door can have its performance changed by minor changes in construction or material selection. Therefore, the need for extensive fire-testing should be reduced in favor of predictive modelling, by use of effective and reliable calculation to ols. Through this project we (on an european expert level) will evaluate existing basic concepts and develop a relevant tool for calculating and assessing the fire performance of wooden constructions. The resulting tool(-s) will be applied on certain case s to be verified for use in different countries.