The MaCFP Condensed Phase Working Group: A Structured, Global Effort towards Pyrolysis Model Development

The International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) Working Group on Measurement and Computation of Fire Phenomena (i.e., the MaCFP Working Group) has been established as a global collaborative effort between experimentalists and modelers in the fire safety science field to make significant and systematic progress in fire modeling, based on a fundamental understanding of fire phenomena. In 2016, the Condensed Phase Phenomena MaCFP Subgroup was formed to maintain an effort focused on improving the predictive capabilities of numerical simulations of thermal decomposition and pyrolysis. Two MaCFP workshops have since been organized as pre-events to recent IAFSS Symposia: the first in summer 2017, in Lund, Sweden, and the second, in spring 2021, which was hosted virtually by the University of Waterloo, Canada. This paper details the planning and coordination needed to organize the Condensed Phase Subgroup's contribution to these two events, with a special emphasis on the efforts enabling the 2021 Workshop, including the following: identification, procurement, and distribution of a reference material; development of guidelines for reporting experimental measurements; and development and maintenance of an online repository for experimental measurements and related analysis scripts. Preliminary analysis of the experimental and modeling results submitted to the 2021 MaCFP Condensed-Phase Workshop are also briefly discussed.