Cardington needed for concrete tests – Cartoon

(Cartoon: Dick Millington)

The constructional steelwork sector is supporting calls to re-open the Cardington large building test facility to allow the UK’s programme of fire testing to resume. Although the steel sector is confident that the behaviour of steel in fire is well known and understood, the need for keeping knowledge fully up to date through testing is recognised – and the behaviour of concrete in fire remains virtually unknown to modern tests.

Supporters of the campaign for the re-opening of the mothballed Cardington, which was started by New Civil Engineer magazine, say it is an asset of international importance and should reopen without delay.

“Only by doing tests at the kind of scale possible with Cardington can you get a full appre-ciation of how buildings really function under differing conditions,” said BCSA’s Director of Engineering David Moore. “In particular, accidental actions such as fire and explosion are difficult if not impossible to simulate by other means, such as computer modelling.”

“We were greatly saddened when Cardington closed although there are currently very few unknowns about the behaviour of steel in fire,” said Corus Construction & Industrial Market and Product Development Manager Roger Steeper.

The concrete sector had in the 1990s a series of six tests planned for concrete framed buildings to update decades-old knowledge about the behaviour of its products in fire, but only one limited test was carried out before Cardington closed in 2002.