A Comparison between two different Methods to Verify Fire Safety Design in Buildings

Abstract: In today’s Nordic construction industry, it is difficult for new and innovative building solutions to be introduced due to prescriptive and inflexible regulations. Trading products and services cross-border is something that could loosen the tough market, but this is not possible due to the lack of common international frameworks that is performance based with the possibility to perform fire safety engineering. This is something that the Nordic Innovation project group called Fire Safety Engineering for Innovative and Sustainable Building Solutions wants to change. By introducing a new probabilistic method to verify fire safety in buildings, with the intention to become a Nordic standard, so will hopefully parts of these problems be resolved. The fourth work package of the project includes field testing of the new method which this thesis is a part of. The idea is to asses and improve the new probabilistic approach by comparing it to an existing non-probabilistic method and introduce ameliorating recommendations. Comparison of the probabilistic method is performed against a Swedish verification process that’s based on the General recommendations on analytical design of fire safety strategy (BBRAD) by verifying fire safety in a car park, that is located below an office building, with both verification methods. The two performance-based analyses treat deviations from a prescriptive solution, performed with the Boverket’s Building Regulations (BBR), and the results of these verifications is compared. The requirements that is verified are; escape in event of fire, protection against the outbreak of fire, protection against the development and spread of fire and smoke in buildings, protection against spread of fire between buildings, possibility of rescue responses and ensuring fire resistance in the structural members. Fire safety designs and approaches for treatment of the deviations are compared and analysed which concludes in the improvement recommendation that’s been presented.  Questions that has been answered during the work process is: How do the methods treat the possibility of a fire safety design without sprinkler? What is the main difference between the two verification methods? Which improvements could be done to the new Probabilistic method?  The recommendations of improvement that has been presented is based on the work process of the probabilistic approach and the comparison with the Swedish verification process. Development of the following areas is advocated: Treatment of critical levels for evacuation scenarios  Form a common Nordic statistical database Improved guidance of how to complete the validation analysis The thesis does not include all parts that’s required in a fire safety design but will merely focus on the deviations of the pre-accepted solution. The verification is only performed on the car park, i.e. the office part of the building is not included.