Con­duct­ing fire tests and smoke tests are a key busi­ness for IFAB. IFAB’s expe­ri­enced team has already car­ried out over 1800 full scale fire tests and smoke tests in total. More than 200 of the full scale tests were car­ried out in test tun­nels. IFAB orga­nized and real­ized tests in many coun­tries includ­ing Ger­many, the UK, Spain, France, Bel­gium, Italy, Poland, Rus­sia, Nor­way, Swe­den, Czech, Chi­na, India, Japan, Brazil, Cana­da, Israel and the US.

The pro­tec­tion objec­tive ori­ent­ed ver­i­fi­ca­tion for com­pen­sato­ry mea­sures as the approval of the effi­cien­cy of

 • extin­guish­ing sys­tems and fire-fight­ing sys­tems (water mist, aerosol, inert gas­es),
 • fire detec­tion sys­tem as well as
 • smoke and heat vent­ing sys­tems

takes place either exper­i­men­tal­ly by fire tests and/or smoke tests, or math­e­mat­i­cal­ly by CFD-sim­u­la­tions. CFD-sim­u­la­tions are addi­tion­al­ly val­i­dat­ed by the test results from fire tests and smoke tests.

The plan­ning, real­iza­tion and eval­u­a­tion of tests as well as CFD sim­u­la­tions is done for the fol­low­ing areas:

 • for stan­dard and spe­cial build­ings (indus­tri­al build­ings, facil­i­ties for meet­ing places or accom­mo­da­tions, indus­tri­al facil­i­ties, stor­ages, machin­ery rooms and plants)
 • for rolling stock (pas­sen­ger areas und machin­ery rooms und tech­ni­cal cab­i­nets) as well as
 • for tun­nels and metro sta­tions

The real­ized full scale fire tests in tun­nels cov­er var­i­ous sce­nar­ios with flam­ma­ble liq­uids or demand­ing sol­id fires up to sizes of 150 MW.

Our fire tests were part of inter­na­tion­al research projects such as SUVEREN, UPTUN, SOLIT and SOLIT2 or relat­ed to pri­vate oper­a­tors like Euro­tun­nel, Dart­ford tun­nel or Tun­nel Mont Blanc.

Ref­er­ences for the applied engi­neer­ing meth­ods can be found here (pdf).