AbstractFlammability testing is largely empirical and consists of many confusions, contradictions and unexplained factors. In order to accomplish reliable fire safety prediction and design, the empirical art of flammability testing has to develop into a quantitative engineering science in which rigorous analyses are made of the various fire phenomena as measured by existing tests. A rudimentary examination of the many existing tests shows that only a few of them measure some property of the material(s)‐fire interaction which will be sufficiently meaningful or useful to develop a scalable hazard rating system. In this paper we examine the meaning of the word 'flammability' to distinguish between the material's response to fire exposure and its contribution to the fire. The functional components of a versatile flammability hazard index are demonstrated to account for the properties of materials, of fire and—of great importance—of use and of human interaction. The promise of modeling techniques to establish these component functions is examined and the directions which future work should take to resolve the questions of fire safety are indi
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