APPLICATION OF PERFORMANCED BASED DESIGN IN FIRE PROTECTION ENGINEERING

Today's building and fire prevention codes are mostly prescriptive. Prescriptive codes are based on major fires in earlier years that created a need for specific building provision. These codes provide a minimum level of safety. As the general and engineering uses of computers have increased over the years, so has use of computers in the fire protection engineering. This has allowed fire protection engineers to develop alternative approaches to solve today's fire protection problems or to evaluate the performance of a specific fire safety goal. A performance based approach to building and fire codes involves the following: 1) identifying specific goals, such as, safely getting out of the building in 10 minutes, 2) obtain conceptual approval from authorities, 3) define performance level, 4) develop design solutions and identify tools such as, fire tests, models, or methods, to demonstrate that a design will meet the fire protection objective 5) test solutions, 6) present test method and results to the authorities. Some people in the fire protection community consider this to be nothing more than an intellectual exercise, while the others view it as a way to reduce expenses on large project$^4$ Others in fire protection community view this as a way to refine the design process to design fire protection systems to better protect the fire hazards. This paper will focus on application of these tools, specifically computer fire models, to actual cases such as: design of a smoke control system heat transfer analysis and egress of building occupants during potential fires.