Fire Engineering

Fire engineering characterises the behaviour of fire and smoke and their impact on the local environment. Providing a holistic approach to fire safety design, it offers architects increased creative scope whilst meeting the requirements of building regulations.

As modern building designs become increasingly ambitious and complex, fire engineering is often essential to addressing the restrictions of code based building standards. By targeting specific design issues, it can be applied to improve efficiency, reduce costs and deliver higher levels of life safety. A fire engineered approach may be the only way to provide a satisfactory standard of fire safety and ultimately comply with the functional requirements of the Building Regulations.

Examples of fire engineering include:

• Means of escape - to extend travel distances, increase evacuation times or reduce the exit and staircase capacities

• Internal fire spread - to justify fire compartment sites, optimise or deviate from prescriptive fire compartmentation and sub-division, or to remove or rationalise the requirements for fire safety systems

• External fire spread - to establish the maximum number of unprotected openings in facades to prevent fire spread by radiation

• Fire resistance - to reduce the requirements for fire protection to the elements of structure, including applied protection

• Fire service access - to optimise and assist access in and around buildings