Why Fire Sprinklers Should Not Be Required in Open Parking Structures

In the 2021 editions of the International Building Code (IBC) and International Fire Code (IFC), provisions were added by code change F110-18 to require automatic sprinkler protection in all open parking structures that exceed 48,000 square feet in fire area. Unfortunately, the technical documentation that was submitted to support such a drastic change to the building and fire codes did not meet the expected robustness to justify these new requirements. This white paper provides: • Historical background information on the fire experience in open parking structures. • A summary of the documentation used to require sprinkler protection for open parking structures in the 2021 IFC. • A review of the potential fire hazards in open parking structures. • An explanation of why this added expense for the construction of open parking structures is not justified.

A review on fire suppression by fire sprinklers

Water spray remains the most effective, environment-friendly and economical way of fighting accidental or unwanted fires, and this is largely due to its thermal characteristics. The mechanism of fire suppression by sprinkler water sprays is influenced by numerous factors, which have been the focus of years’-long and on-going research studies to improve its extinguishing performances. A comprehensive review study was carried out in this study to assess the level of technological know-how and current state of research in the field. A total of 2473 published articles spanning 50 years (i.e. 1970–2020) were systematically collected and analysed, whereby more than 100 relevant articles were selected and integrated in the discussion. In particular, the review focuses on research relating to the interactions of sprinkler sprays with flame, fire plume and hot surfaces, aiming to provide a better understanding of the phenomena involved in fire suppression.

Forest Fire and Trespassing Detection using WSN with PIR sensor

Fire occurring in forest has become a major crises, the hard part of this is passing information about fire occurred is delay which in turn allow to increase the spread of fire. There are two preeminent reasons on delay, first is place or region in which fire has occurred and the other is passing information about fire to outer world. Forest fire can be controlled using appropriate technique and officials can control the wild fire before spreading, if the information is passed fast. Human trespassing is one of the dominant acumen for wild fires. In order to know the type of the fire depending upon the region and also deportation of data about fire occurred, we framed a lay out, forest fire detector that uses wireless sensor networks. The detector is able to inform us whether it is a crown fire or ground fire depending upon the region using fire sensors and PIR via NodeMCU ESP8266. PIR is used to detect the presence of humans within the preserved regions of wild. The detectors that are connected to the NodeMCU pass the information to tan other NodeMCU using server client configuration. Depending on the type of fire, sprinklers are activated to control ground fire and drones carrying fire resistant dry chemicals are used to spread them from above for crown fire.

INDOOR 3D INTERACTIVE ASSET DETECTION USING A SMARTPHONE

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Building floor plans with locations of safety, security and energy assets such as IoT sensors, thermostats, fire sprinklers, EXIT signs, fire alarms, smoke detectors, routers etc. are vital for climate control, emergency security, safety, and maintenance of building infrastructure. Existing approaches to building survey are manual, and usually involve an operator with a clipboard and pen, or a tablet enumerating and localizing assets in each room. In this paper, we propose an interactive method for a human operator to use an app on a smart phone to (a) create the 2D layout of a room, (b) detect assets of interest, and (c) localize them within the layout. We use deep learning methods to train a neural network to recognize assets of interest, and use human in the loop interactive methods to correct erroneous recognitions by the networks. These corrections are then used to improve the accuracy of the system over time as the inspector moves from one room to another in a given building or from one building to the next; this progressive training and testing mechanism makes our system useful in building inspection scenarios where a given class of assets in a building are same instantiation of that object category, thus reducing the problem to instance, rather than category recognition. Experiments show our proposed method to achieve accuracy rate of 76% for testing 102 objects across 10 classes.</p>

Cost-benefit analyses of sprinklers in nursing homes for elderly

The risk of dying in fires in nursing homes is six times the risk of dying in fires at home in Sweden. One way to reduce this risk is to install fire sprinklers. This study measures the benefits using value of full lives, life years and quality adjusted life years (QALYs) for deaths and injuries. The results show that sprinklers are cost-effective in newly built nursing homes no matter what value of life is used. However, if sprinklers are installed in already existing buildings, they are cost-effective only if the value of a statistical life is used.