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FIRE SERVICE AND GENERAL FIRE SAFETY TOPICS => Fire Safety => Topic started by: GB on August 04, 2011, 02:34:24 PM
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A lot of discussion has ensued following the publication of the NHBC Foundation / BRE Trusts report 'Open plan flat layouts', love it or hate it there is something available to discuss.
Does anyone know of any report / research on open plan duplex accommodation.
I have completed some of my own CFD models (its amazing what we have to do when there is no new box sets of '24' available!) but wanted to review the findings against other opinions / research to validate or otherwise the results obtained.
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Stu pointed out recently that the NHBC 'code complaint' apartment wasn't always 'code-complaint'. That being the case, any results based on this do not show anything whereby a comparison with a 'code-compliant' building can be made.
I would suggest that a fire on the opposite side of a fire door, and limited travel distances to the front door, would always be better than a fire in an access room that is being controlled by sprinklers.
I would be interested to see where the NHBC research has been used to create open plan apartments, and then to compare it with the various determinations where the SoS has ruled that such designs are unsuitable.
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Thanks for your response.
For fear of getting pulled into the debate of what is the liklihood (evidence based rather than opinion) would the fire door be closed etc etc, which can take the post away from the original question, I would value your response if you know of any research to prove or otherwise what conditions can be expected from an open plan duplex escape.
No doubt my next post would then be 'what evidence is there that an ADB compliant design is safer than an open plan engineered design' but that is an other avenue we could get pulled in ;)
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The accepted failure rate of a fire door (due to malfunction/being left open etc) is 0.3 according to the PD from the 7974 series which deals with such stuff. I believe that this is based on some random sampling of doors generally in various premises.
If you are going to factor in the likelihood of a door failing, then you have to factor in the likelihood of the sprinkler system OR the detecton failing, as either of these will have a large impact on the tenability and/or pre-movement times. I can't remember if the NHBC report looked at this.
I am not aware of any research on duplex type apartments, but if the bedrooms were up some open plan stairs you would probably have great trouble with tenability levels due to having to walk down through the hot layer. Build it upside down and you would have a fighting chance.