Fire Protection

Aim: The main purpose of this article is to provide a discourse about current regulations dealing with fire safety of bridges in Poland and share the outcome with a wider group of specialists, who are involved with fire safety issues. Introduction: For thousands of years bridges have played a particularly important part in people's communications network. From primitive and makeshift crossings to complicated applications of structural mechanics, bridges have always been a symbol of unity and development. The Polish public road network currently contains over thirty five thousand bridge structures and tunnels with a cumulative distance of over one thousand and fifty kilometres. Damage, temporary closure or total destruction of a bridge can have a significantly negative impact on the region and part of the affected communications network. The article examines current regulations dealing with the fire safety of bridges, for road and rail networks. The second part of the paper contains a brief summary of regulatory developments in the last hundred years and provides an insight for the basis of present day regulations. The last part of the article contains a concise description of the impact that a fire can have on the superstructure of a bridge. Depending on materials used in the construction, a fire can impact on the bridge or its components, in different ways, and result in a severe reduction of its lifespan and designed load bearing ability.
Methodology: The authors performed a review of current Polish regulations and publications dealing with fire safety. The current legal position is summarized by a range of ministerial directives and several instructions, ratified by ministers and published by state companies involved with the bridge industry. The authors identified a number of issues contained in regulations, which in their view should be clarified or updated. Additionally, the second part of the article provides a description of consequences impacting on the bridge superstructure, which, depending on the material used in construction, can result from an intensive fire.
Conclusion: Generally, the authors consider current regulations concerning bridge fire safety as appropriate. However, a number of proposed improvements would positively enhance the fire safety of bridges in Poland.

Regionally, nationally and globally, threats to life, property and resources from wildfire are growing. Changing climate conditions, growth of vulnerable communities into high-hazard areas, and limited governmental and financial resources available to cope with this threat all mean that wildfire losses are expected to continue and expand. It is not possible to find a single and simple solution to all of the problems that the scenario of larger, damaging wildfire presents. However, when focusing on how to prevent wildland/urban interface (WUI) fire disasters—the destruction of dozens or hundreds of structures during significant wildfire events—researchers and safety advocates have discovered solutions in the form of voluntary community action to reduce wildfire risks around homes and neighborhoods, and in sound design and construction standards that can be adopted and applied by state and local governments.

National Fire Protection Association’s (NFPA) Firewise program provides a sustainable solution to the growing trend of home losses during wildland fires. The Firewise Communities/USA® Recognition Program provides the process for WUI residents and a model for behavior change that effectively reduces the risk of home—and thus community—ignitions. The program has been growing steadily since its inception fifteen years ago. In this paper, we will examine the development of Firewise communities and how they have expanded nationally and in the state of Arizona. We will also examine Arizona-based success stories resulting from the embrace of Firewise principles at the community level.

To understand how to prevent WUI disasters, one must understand how homes ignite and burn during a wildfire. This paper will cover the most current research and evidence on this topic, and the surprisingly simple techniques that can be used by property owners to prevent home ignitions.

Finally, we will examine why regulation and zoning ordinances are also an important component in the equation to find a solution to this growing wildfire “menace.” A helpful study produced by the Fire Protection Research Foundation, Community Wildfire Safety through Regulation, will be explored. We will introduce information on NFPA design and construction standards that can be adopted in whole or in part by communities as components of local building and fire codes. We will conclude by demonstrating how planning and zoning tools have great potential to be effective in risk reduction in the event of a wildfire.

Fire  risk  assessment  has  always  been  a  challenging  issue.  furthermore,  performance  based  approaches  to fire  engineering  showed  that  risk  based  decisions  and  fire  scenarios  are  a  fundamental  element  of  the  fire  safety strategy assurance.
In particular, a correct assessment of the risk allows all the involved stakeholders to identify a  specific  strategy  among  a  pool  of  possibilities.  Risk  assessment is  the  perfect  tool  to  identify
comparable  fire  protection  strategies  and  to  measure  fire  risk  reduction  associated  to  the  single  specific  prevention and protection measures composing each different fire strategies.
This approach implies the need to abandon a classic, not even conservative approach, that in many cases linked the total fire load to the fire risk level, despite specific dynamics, layouts, prevention measures and risk management issues during time.
During the years, a number of different methodologies have been developed: for specific cases, for industrial or civil buildings, to adopt a method enforced by the local law and regulations acts, etc. Methods have been based  on  matrices,  indexes,  check-lists,  etc.  Present  paper  illustrates  a  method  developed  by  the  authors  taking into account several international recognized methods; even coming back to methodologies developed in early seventies.
The Method is named “FLAME” (Fire risk Assessment Method for  Enterprises), it goes back  to  the  fire  safety  fundamentals  against  a  generalized  approach  to  fire  safety  engineering  based  on  complex
and time -consuming  methods like CFD that deals only with the ‘consequences’ aspect of the fire risk (that is indeed characterized also by frequency estimation) using as reference scheme the “Fire Safety Concept Tree” explained in detail in the NFPA 550 Standard. In order to identify the most appropriate fire safety strategy it is important  to  identify  the  associated  fire  risk  that  the  strategy  is  intended  to  mitigate  to  a  certain  level. Alternative  solutions  can  be  evaluated
considering the  risk reduction operated by  different  strategies  and  by
different elements composing the fire strategies themselves and also costs with a modern ALARP approach.
A clear advantage is the possibility to get an overview of the whole fire risk as the cumulative risk assessed by  the  model  and  not  solely  related  with  the  consequences  evaluation  of  a  limited  number  of  fire  scenarios (usually the most obvious ones). Risk level assessment leads to the identification of the fire scenario (or a pool of) that governs and limits the specific situation, declined for both humans and structures (assets) considering  that the two vulnerabilities could be linked to different fire risk scenarios.
The method has been tested against different buildings occupancies. In the present case results of the FLAME method application to hospitals and health-care facilities are reported. A fire compartment-based risk estimation has been conducted on an overall of  about  300  compartments  (overall  size  of  about  60000  m 2).  Coherence  has  been  found  among  risk estimation  by  FLAME  parametric  code  and  prescriptions  of  the  Italian  fire  code.
There  is  good  agreement when assessing the RSET with the method proposed in FLAME, dealing with the occupants’  behaviour and the actual characteristics of occupants in clinics or hospitals and difficulties due to poor mobility or incapacity to understand emergency cue.

An efficient numerical approach is developed in this paper for heat transfer analysis of insulated steel members exposed to fire, characterized by one-dimensional conduction through an insulation layer. The numerical schemes make use of Green's function solutions of diffusion equations, and consequently no spatial discretization is involved. Two types of time-varying boundary conditions, namely, the essential (Dirichlet) and the natural (Neumann), are treated individually. Computational models are developed for boundary conditions of each type, in which the choice of sampling time does not have the numerical stability requirement imposed. The numerical algorithm can be implemented in an Excel spreadsheet for engineering use.

The use of a new class of renewable liquid polyfurfuryl alcohol (PFA) resins has been investigated for use in composite applications for mass transport. PFA resins originate from the hemicellulose fraction of agricultural waste materials and with their char building potential posses an intrinsic resistance to fire and high temperature.

In this review paper, we are going to discuss the properties, composites of ablative material, and their application in various departments of engineering (composite names). In the aerospace department, it is used as protecting layer on the surface of the rocket, where it reduces the outcomes of an increase in temperature due to higher heat flux (2000⁰C to 2500⁰C). We have also discussed the stages which it undergoes during the flow of heat, with the understanding of its classification to what type of ablative material is used with the use of other compounds. What would it be like if we would consider an ideal ablative material, with the application and its operation.

The most common fire protections (e.g. intumescent coatings, board based systems, sprayed fire protection systems and also concrete encasement or filling) reduce the heating during a fire. Intumescent coating (i.c.) are often used on exposed steel structures, since the structural, aesthetic, and architectural value of the structural objects remains preserved. Indeed, i.c. normally form a protective layer on the surface. When exposed to fire or excessive heat, the protective layer will resist and absorb heat, thus protecting the structural member from damage or deformation. Volume expansion and density reduction takes place when temperature starts to rise. In order to perform rigorous and realistic analyses on protected steel members, thermal properties of all materials, including i.c., have to be known. Nevertheless, especially for existing buildings, the thermal characterization of these systems is not available and therefore experimental tests at high temperature should be performed. Recently, an experimental program was performed at the horizontal furnace of the Italian National Fire Services in Rome to characterize the fire behavior of i.c. applied on an existing 80's steel building. The most significant results are shown to highlight the practical significance of the experimental research.