Fire tests on Cardington steel framed buildings
Fire testing by BRE and British Steel
Between 1994 and 1997, BRE, in collaboration with British Steel (now Tata Steel), conducted a series of six large scale fire tests on a modern multi-storey composite steel framed buildings. These buildings were constructed within the BRE large scale test facility at Cardington near Bedford. Two of these tests were carried out by BRE and four by British Steel.
The results from this ground breaking research project have enabled the development of performance based structural fire engineering and greatly improved the understanding of real buildings subject to real fires.
Publication of the test data
Although the general results have been disseminated in journals and conference proceedings, the detailed data from all six tests has never been made available in full. The UK steel industry supported the collation, arrangement and dissemination of the data from the four tests carried out by British Steel and this is available on the web based one stop shop for structural fire engineering hosted by the University of Manchester.
However, the raw data from the two fire tests carried out by BRE has never previously been made publicly available. That omission has been rectified by the publication of this document and the accompanying data on the BRE web site.
Large scale fire test results are essential in validating software used in structural fire engineering design. It is hoped that the provision of the data from the BRE fire tests in a format that can be used by those involved in structural fire engineering design and research will be of benefit to the UK construction industry.
This work has been funded by the support of the BRE Trust, with a contribution from Tata Steel.
Download the data
BRE Cardington Fire Test Report ( BRE Cardington Steel Framed Building Fire Tests SM.pdf)
BRE corner fire test data (Corner.zip)
BRE large compartment fire test (LCFT.zip)