Actual-size experiment on the fire spreading with three-storied Wooden Condominium in city distric

Recently, a world-wide demand toward construction market expanding the construction of three-storied Wooden Condominium in the city district to maximize limited space is rapidly growing to vitalize forestry industry and international trading inbalance. In order to examine the feasibility of constructing such a large-scale wooden building from standpoint of fire prevention, it is necessary not only to verify the possibility of fire spreading by three-storied Wooden Condominium Building even in city district.
For this purpose, an experiment has been conducted at the Research Institute of Construction in Tsukuba-City, Ibaraki Prefecture. In that experiment, three-storied Wooden Condominium Building was actually built in the outdoor fire experimenting site, and fire was provoked in the adjacent site to see how fire spreading come and how it affect two-storied wooden buildings positioned in the surrounding area.
Three units of TVS were used in the experiment to observe the situation from three different directions. Since ordinary visual camera has a tendency to create halation for the object of fire, it has the shortcomings of not being able to see the extant of burning correctly, and of not easily to see the state and condition of fire if the burning is weak. On the other and, TVS has the advantage of being able to see the intensity of burning magnitude from weak to strong states of fire.
As a result of experiment, it was demonstrated that the spreading speed of fire of three-storied Wooden Condominium Building is considerably slow, and that the effect of fire to surrounding two-storied buildings is minimal. Therefore, the safety of three-storied Wooden Condominium for fire has been proved scientifically. After this, the results obtained from this experiment will be used as a basic data for investigating the possibility of constructing three-storied Wooden Condominium Buildings in the city district to save space in Japan.