Abstract | In recent years, there have been a number of efforts to improve the quality of residential building environments in North America to meet public demands for better acoustic isolation. More stringent acoustic requirements were recently adopted in Canadian building codes and have necessitated changes in traditional construction practices. In addition, new construction materials have been developed and manyconstruction practices and product specifications have changed over the past several years. Such changes may alter the fire resistance of floor assemblies. Consequently, there was a need to reaffirm existing fire resistance data for common floor constructions. This includes the information contained in Part 9, "Housing and Small Buildings", Appendix A-9.10.3.1.B of the National Building Code of Canada (NBCC), 1995 Edition [1] which provides architects, building officials and fire protection engineers with simpledetailed information on sound and fire resistance ratings for floor assemblies commonly used in the construction of housing in Canada. In response to the changes noted above, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), in collaboration with industry and government partners, carried out aresearch program to measure the acoustic and fire performance of floor assemblies. The objectives of this research is to reaffirm existing fire resistance ratings in the current NBCC and to develop cost-effective and innovative floor assemblies. This report describes the results of the fire study. The results of the acoustic tests are presented in a separate NRC report [2]. |
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