Determination of Appropriate Operation of Firefighting Facility using Fire and Evacuation Simulations

Recently, a performance-based design of a fire protection facility has been proposed that significantly contributes to the construction of safe and reliable buildings. Improving the performance of the fire protection facility will enable protection of the public along with the infrastructure. Designs focusing on the fire protection performance generally add or modify architectural aspects through fire and evacuation simulations. However, a secure evacuation system aided with CCTVs has rarely been considered as an active system. Particularly for apartments, it is very difficult to assure evacuation safety without using an active system in fire and evacuation simulations with the front door of the burning room open. Safety can be achieved by combining a passive system with an active system, on the basis that the building premises has the foundation of a passive system. The regulation on the evacuation delay time in the nation was brought in effect through the SFPE paper but was deleted since the data reliability was insufficient. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to analyze the operation of a fire protection facility required to ensure safety by planning multiple simulations of a fire and evacuation system. An apartment has been considered as an example to design the foundation for a standard evacuation safety system. An active system is applied to execute fire and evacuation simulations, with focus on the fire protection performance.

A Study on the Improvement Plan of Performance-based Design of Officetels of Residential Structure

This study aims to identify the effect of the occupant density, application of the evacuation delay time, and the degree of opening of the fire doors in the household, parameters that are used in the performance-based design of the officetels of a residential structure, on the evaluation of evacuation safety and to suggest realistic alternatives. To this end, a preliminary survey was conducted on the number and ratio of residential officetels among the performance-based design targets in Gwangju Metropolitan City, which were implemented up to December 2020. Following this, two representative examples were selected, and for each type, an occupant density of 9.3 m2/person and 18.6 m2/person and an evacuation delay time of W1 and W2 were applied. In addition, for the degree of opening of the fire doors, full opening, 1/4 opening, and leakage gap were applied. With these conditions, the evaluation of evacuation safety was performed for 32 cases. Results of the evaluation showed that evacuation safety was secured in all cases for an occupant density of 18.6 m2/person, an evacuation delay time of W2, and the application of a leakage gap to the opening of the fire door. Therefore, using the above mentioned three parameters for the performance-based design of officetels of residential structures, we have proposed a more realistic design method in this study.