Are Pan Fire Tests the Right Way to Assess Sprinkler

As buildings with a high ceiling clearance are becoming increasingly common, making proper assessments of whether or not the ceiling sprinklers would actuate becomes very critical for such buildings. One of the commonly adopted processes for the assessments are: (1) to evaluate the potential fire load inside a facility and convert that to the maximum anticipated heat release rate, and (2) to run a pan fire test that would generate the heat release rate equivalent to the value estimated from the previous step and see if any ceiling sprinklers to actuate. If such an assessment indicates no ceiling sprinkler actuation, then a waiver of the requirement of sprinkler installation often follows---leaving the building with no active fire protection system. An analysis in this study based on a large volume of test data shows that assessing sprinkler actuations based on pan fire tests will be likely to lead to a wrong conclusion. The critical fire sizes that would actuate sprinklers on high ceilings under various conditions are also presented as a reference