Italian hybrid fire prevention code

Fire safety of residential buildings and activities subjected to fire inspection is a difficult task, especially when the safety targets have to be adopted in built buildings or in activities that are going to be modified into more complex ones. Generally, these circumstances show more constraints and it could be difficult to achieve an acceptable level of fire residual risk by prescriptive based fireregulations. Therefore, the Italian National Fire Rescue and Service in charge for fire safety, in August 2015 issued a new Fire Prevention Code whose design methodology is more oriented to fire performance based design rather than prescriptive fire codes. The flexibility of this new fire design methodology offers a very complex tool to experts in order to design fire safety measures and strategies of buildings and activities subjected to fire inspection. The present paper aims tohighlig hts the contents and the fire safety strategy design methodology of the new Italian Fire Prevention Code

Ultra-High performance concrete (UHPC) with polypropylene (Pp) and steel Fibres: Investigation on the high temperature behaviour

Ultra-high performance concretes (UHPC) are advanced cement-based materials characterised by superior me-chanical properties with respect to normal and high-strength concretes; however, their dense and compact matrix can facilitate the onset of spalling at high temperatures. This problem is often coped up by adding polypropylene (PP) fibres to the mix design, alone or with other types of fibres; steel fibres enhance the material’s tensile ca-pacity. The paper presents a series of tests on two UHPC types (150 and 180 N/mm2) with PP fibres (0.27% of volume) and variable content of steel fibres (0% to 1.92%), aimed at investigating the residual mechanical properties of the material after high temperature exposure. The experimental results are compared to available research on small UHPC specimens exposed to high temperatures, with dosages in PP fibres from 0.03% to 2%, and in steel fibres from 0 to 3%. The results of this research demonstrate that UHPCs need hybrid fibre rein-forcement (PP +steel) to withstand high temperatures, and that the residual strength increases after 200 ◦C exposure, at all steel fibre dosages; this is in line with literature. Available research also shows that strength loss is possible in hot conditions, as found in the present research, while PP fibres alone do not always prevent the occurrence of spalling in small UHPC sample

The new Italian Fire Code: a more performance-based approach to fire safety design

Fire safety codes and regulations play critical roles in buildings and high hazard industries, helping to mitigate risks and achieve acceptable levels of safety. On 20th of August 2015, the Italian Home Office released the Ministerial Decree 3rd August 2015 that contains a new approach to the fire safety design of working activities subjected to fire inspection. The technical Ministerial Decree is commonly recognised among Italian fire officers and fire practitioners as the Fire Prevention Code (FPC). FPC has been thought and developed within the Italian National Fire Rescue and Service by fire officer engineers and fire practitioner experts to simplify and rationalize the fire safety design. This paper describes the new design approach proposed by the FPC highlighting how the fire safety is more oriented to a performance base design rather than a prescriptive one

Esodo d'emergenza: modellazione e realtà a confronto

La possibilità di modellare l’esodo di emergenza tramite codici numerici avanzati è prevista dalle Norme Tecniche di Prevenzione Incendi, che individuano nei metodi dell’ingegneria della sicurezza antincendio uno strumento per effettuare delle valutazioni per la salvaguardia della vita degli occupanti. La bontà di tale modellazione però dipende fortemente da alcuni parametri di input (tempo di attività di premovimento, velocità degli utenti, familiarità con il sistema di esodo), affetti da grande incertezza e variabilità. Ci si propone di approfondire questo aspetto peculiare della modellazione dell’evacuazione, affiancando alle simulazioni una prova di esodo reale, con l’obiettivo di individuare quali migliorie possono essere apportate ai modelli numerici potendo calibrare i dati in ingresso sulla base di risultati provenienti da prove effettuata su scala reale

Validation of premovement time distribution for evacuation modelling using real data from evacuation drills

The primary component of a performance-based fire safety analysis is the prediction of evacuee movement. The forecast of how people respond to building emergencies can aid in safer building design, improving the level of safety afforded by these designs and reflecting its benefits also in the development of more effective emergency procedures, emergency communication systems, and pre-event emergency training for buildings and communities. Therefore, the use of evacuation models imply the difficult choice of parameters that govern human behaviours, since these parameters implicitly have a large uncertainties. This paper aims to compare the results of an evacuation drill involving a large number of people with agent-based evacuation models, using FDS+Evac and Pathfinder. Nevertheless, a plausible estimation of the pre-movement activity time is a challenge in the field of fire safety of buildings and the possibility of comparing evacuation drills experimental data to the results of evacuation models gives importance to the topic

Comparison between experimental tests and computer models of a smokeproof enclosure safety vestibule

Pressure differential systems offer the facility of maintaining tenable conditions in protected spaces, for example escape routes, firefighting access routes, firefighting shafts, lobbies, staircases, and other areas that require to be kept free of smoke. The aim is to establish a pressure gradient (and thus an airflow pattern) with the protected escape space at the highest pressure and the pressure progressively decreasing in areas away from the escape routes. Smoke control using pressure differentials generally are limited to the protection of enclosed spaces adjacent to spaces smoke logged in the event of a fire. This research highlights some fundamental aspects on the pressurization and depressurization transient and the airflow field development through experiments and numerical simulations, with a focus on the pressure variation inside a lobby space and on the velocity profile across an open door in a pressurized lobby