Fire safety engineering:
Quarterly newsletter - December 2016 Monideep Dey, PhD
This newsletter by Monideep Dey is published every quarter to inform subscribers of developments in Fire Safety Engineering (FSE), especially on the use of international FSE standards in national fire safety regulations. Reports of the activities of ISO TC 92 SC4, Fire Safety Engineering, in which Monideep Dey, PhD represents the American National Standards Institute as a Chair (Convenor), will also be included.
Recent webinars to note
The subject of approaching fire safety in a top-down manner, or with a global perspective, has been discussed in many papers since the early 1980s. It is useful to examine the evolution of fire protection requirements (see SFPE Webinar, July 25, 2016, Carl F Baldassara) and determine whether the current set of prescriptive requirements have become overly burdensome and are curtailing the freedom to design.
Both these articles and others on the subject of prescriptive requirements are useful in discussing where we go with fire safety regulation in the future, given the advances in fire calculation methods.
40th Meeting of ISO TC 92 SC 4, Fire Safety Engineering
Jogye-sa Budddhist Temple, Seoul, Republic of Korea - Site of meeting
The 40th meeting of ISO TC 92 SC 4 was held in Seoul, Republic of Korea, on October 17-21, 2016. The highlight of the meeting was a workshop to plan new work items to develop international standards to support the new strategic objectives developed by the subcommittee.
Am important strategic objective is to "develop documents that are both useful and practical for end users, and can be applied worldwide irrespective of the degree of experience in and implementation of FSE”. A major challenge to the fire safety industry is the assessment of innovative performance-based designs in comparison to the prescriptive regulations for fire safety that exist in most countries.
A proposal to make ISO fire safety standards more practical by developing A unified international standard that covers prescriptive and performance-based fire safety design was presented at the workshop on new work items (see slides and paper).
Other important sessions at the 40th meeting were on the revision of ISO 23932, General Principles, aimed at linking current ISO FSE standards, and on development of new standards on guidance for the use of CFD models in performance-based fire safety design, and establishing the validation database of fire calculation methods.
