A medium-scale melting experiment rig was designed and constructed in this study. A detailed experimental study was conducted on the melting behavior and the chemical kinetic characteristics of three typical thermoplastic materials, including polypropylene (PP), polyethylene (PE) and polystyrene (PS). It is observed that the thermal decomposition of the thermoplastic materials mainly consists of three stages: the initial heating stage, the melting-dominated stage and the gasification-dominated stage. Melting of the materials examined takes place within a certain temperature range. The melting temperature of PS is the lowest, moreover, it takes the shortest time to be completely liquefied. To quantitatively represent the chemical kinetics, an nth-order reaction model was employed to interpret the thermal decomposition behavior of the materials. The calculated reaction order is largely in accordance with the small-scale thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA). The small difference between the results and TGA data suggests that there are some limitations in the small-scale experiments in simulating the behavior of thermoplastic materials in a thermal hazard. Therefore, investigating the thermal physical and chemical properties of the thermoplastic materials and their thermal hazard prevention in medium or large-scale experiments is necessary for the fire safety considerations of polymer materials. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.