Innovation in designing safer buildings Throughout 100 years of fire safety design, a predominant principle has been to mitigate the risk of fire spread by using passive fire separation. Separation units have been used in order to mitigate the risk of a fire spreading inside a building or between several buildings. As modern architecture has developed extensively over the same period to include more and larger areas of open space within public and commercial buildings, such as atriums, the opportunities for traditional passive fire separations design have been greatly challenged. In addition, there is a growing demand for fire safety initiatives supporting instead of restricting processes & flows within public and commercial buildings. The starting point of the overall fire safety strategy is expected to consider not only the total cost for a new building, but also the running costs of ineffective working processes counted over a long period, since they could exceed the total building cost of the fire safety initiatives. Performance-based design Performance-based design is increasingly used in Europe to define prevention and protection measures that must be taken in applications of public and commercial building types that present fire hazards. The methods of fire safety engineering (FSE) are used in the pre-flashover phase to verify / dimension the escape route systems according to the propagation of fires and the development of the products of combustion, while in the post-flashover phase fire engineering methods are used to calculate the fire resistance of structures and the intervening of the fire brigade. High-pressure water mist technology provides an opportunity to rethink traditional ways of designing fire safe buildings. Due to the characteristics of water mist technology, it is natural to base the fire safety strategy on water mist applications to match the overall environment requirements for a project. High-pressure water mist technology can attenuate temperatures and radiation. This performance is evaluated by determining the level of critical temperatures and radiation according to acceptance criteria for human safety and fire safety in relation to fire and smoke spread. A fire performance safety analysis can be conducted on typical fire safety focus areas like evacuation & rescue measures, fire brigade’s intervention, fire safety installations, fire and smoke spread and structures. By combining additional advantages of high-pressure water mist’s superior characteristics with the performance based fire safety strategy, a safer building design and very important indirect savings can be ensured. 6 Danfoss Fire Safety A/S · Fire fighting technology
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