Fire Engineering - Literature review Example

The study explores the role of these consultants in ensuring building design, development and sustenance for adherence to fire safety to understand the extent to which fire safety engineering solutions are important in fire engineering today. As buildings codes exist, so do the need for inspection for compliance and for adherence to fire safety which is usually overlooked by concerned administration or engineers in the respective departments. A building is a complex system with fire safety design being a part or inter-related sub-system of this complex system design.

Two parameters: fire load density FLD (in MJm–2) and occupant load factor OLF are key in assessment of local fire codes in Hong Kong. A survey of private buildings in Hong Kong in February 1998 revealed that just 11 percent of the buildings were in satisfactory conditions in terms of fire safety. The survey was conducted by Fire Services Department (FSD) for provision and compliance with fire service installations and equipment (FSI) for fire prevention, detection and protection in the buildings.

Incidents of fire in domestic and commercial buildings and rail and road tunnels have attracted criticism from the public as well as from other quarters and there have been constant changes in the building ordinance for fire safety to protect life and property. A framework for fire safety exists, based on which it is learnt that various countries including Hong Kong and Australia have developed a regulatory system for fire safety in buildings. The framework provides goals, objectives, performance requirements and means of compliance for building fire safety (Code of Practice for Fire Safety in Buildings, 2011).

Factors determining fire safety in buildings, codes of practice for fire safety, design and performance of fire safety framework, compliance issues by segment, health and safety of building occupants and the insights into fire fighting industry in general in Hong Kong will be covered in this chapter. As buildings codes exist, so do the need for inspection for compliance and for adherence to fire safety which is usually overlooked by concerned administration or engineers in the respective departments.

The role of these consultants in ensuring building design, development and sustenance for adherence to fire safety will also be explored to understand the extent to which fire safety engineering solutions are important in fire engineering today. Building occupancy Considering that Asian cities are becoming more urban with most of the population residing in high-rise buildings can be useful in studying the fire engineering solutions being employed to protect the life of the occupants and also the property.

A study of the differences in structures shows that compartmentalized and non-compartmentalized structures with isomorphic and non-isomorphic floor plans can be assessed for fire safety (Livesay and Donegan, 2003, p 64.1) using different models like flame spread model, heat transfer model, etc. (Bong, 2000). Hong Kong has a building control mechanism as shown in Figure 1 which includes design for fire safety mechanism as per codes of practice laid by two different legislative bodies, Buildings Ordinance (BO) and the Fire Services Ordinance (FSO), the compliance for which is overlooked by an Authorized Person (AP) acting as the project co-ordinator.

The AP ensures that the building design, construction and management are in compliance with the BO in terms of fire engineering approach and performance (Lo et al, 2007, pp 133,134). Figure 1: Building control mechanism in Hong Kong. Source: (Lo et al, 2007, p 134). Building fire safety control mechanism takes into account the route complexity owing to the topological network of rooms and the passages that connect the rooms and floors to the exit space. Information theory and entropy are studied to formulate a mathematical model in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to evaluate the complexity of egress (or means of escape) based on route complexity.

Building type comparisons are carried out by considering building plans as networks with the habitable compartments considered as the nodes of the network while the defined links between nodes or the connected passages between rooms and floors are considered as arcs or information steps. Using this information and the behaviour of fire using the different models, the egress