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

Transparency vs magic numbers : The development of stair design requirements in the Italian Fire Safety Code

Practitioners may face difficulties in the interpretation of fire codes since they often present so called "magic numbers", i.e. numbers available in the codes which are listed for providing the design of building fire safety, for which the derivation and justification are not explained. The present paper discusses the need for a transparent regulatory approach, in which legislators publicly justify each of the choices made during the development of the fire codes. This approach has been used for the first time during the development of the Italian Fire Safety Code DM03/08/15, where the process adopted for the development of the code requirements has been publicly released in parallel with the code itself. This is deemed to facilitate the interpretation of the fire code, avoiding mis-use and preventing criticism on lack of transparency. To address this issue, the Italian legislators have conducted a process of reconstructing the assumptions adopted for the definition of magic numbers in other International codes (i.e., British Standard 9999) in order to identify suitable specifications for the national context under consideration. This includes the performance of a series of calculations rather than a mere historical examination of their basis. As a first attempt towards an increased transparency in fire code development at an International level, this paper publicly summarizes the process adopted by the Italian legislators for the development of the new Italian fire code, focusing on the exemplary case of the calculations performed for the definition of the requirements concerning stair design (i.e. vertical evacuation). This is presented by comparing the deemed-to-satisfy provisions of the Italian code with the ones given in the British Standard 9999. The process of developing fire codes is discussed together with the benefits associated with transparency in the assumptions adopted for their definition

Development and testing of BlenderFDS, the open, community-based, user interface for NIST FDS

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools have increasingly begun to play an important role in risk assessments for fire safety design. NIST Fire dynamics simulator (FDS) seems the CFD modeling tool of first choice for the world-wide community of fire engineers. FDS is being developed as a CFD code only, so no user interface is available to the user, and the input data pre-processing phase is completely left to the user responsibility. In real world cases, especially where complex or curved geometries are to be described, the data input phase represents an important cost for the fire engineer. Back in 2009, in the opinion of the authors, no satisfactory pre-processing tool for this purpose existed. No multi-platform, open source and freely available pre-processing tool existed at all. The lack of an open pre-processor tool motivated the development of BlenderFDS, the open, community-based, user interface for FDS. This paper describes the design process and development choices of this new tool. Then the results of a recent, through evaluation of the tool are presented: BlenderFDS was employed for a fire safety study on Castel Thun, a fascinating medieval castle located at the foot of the Italian Alps. BlenderFDS allowed for a satisfactory control over the input data, and the generated namelists groups. The graphical user interface for 3D solid modeling and intense data sharing between BlenderFDS entities prevented duplication of efforts and lowered the risk of input data errors. This study demonstrates the value of a fully open tool-chain for CFD fire safety analysis. BlenderFDS tool is following the evolution of FDS ecosystem, both in terms of new FDS features and in terms of FDS users' community needs. Its open, bottom-up development model seems to be mostly appropriate to withstand such a challenge

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

A hierarchy of imperative languages for the feasible classes DTIMEF(n(k)) and for the superexponential classes DTIMEF((k)n)

An imperative programming language is defined by closure of a free word-algebra of de/con-structors under two new operators (simultaneous safe recurrence and constructive diagonalization). By assigning ordinals to its programs a transfinite hierarchy of imperative languages is introduced which singles-out the feasible classes DTIMEF (nk) and the superexponential classes DTIMEF (kn)

A Multi-Fidelity Framework for Wildland Fire Behavior Simulations over Complex Terrain

A method for the large-eddy simulation (LES) of wildfire spread over complex terrain is presented. In this scheme, a cut-cell immersed boundary method (CC-IBM) is used to render the complex terrain, defined by a tessellation, on a rectilinear Cartesian grid. Discretization of scalar transport equations for chemical species is done via a finite volume scheme on cut-cells defined by the intersection of the terrain geometry and the Cartesian cells. Momentum transport and heat transfer close to the immersed terrain are handled using dynamic wall models and a direct forcing immersed boundary method. A new “open” convective inflow/outflow method for specifying atmospheric wind boundary conditions is presented. Additionally, three basic approaches have been explored to model fire spread: (1) Representing the vegetation as a collection of Lagrangian particles, (2) representing the vegetation as a semi-porous boundary, and (3) representing the fire spread using a level set method, in which the fire spreads as a function of terrain slope, vegetation type, and wind speed. Several test and validation cases are reported to demonstrate the capabilities of this novel wildfire simulation methodology

Deployment of ground and aerial robots in earthquake-struck Amatrice in Italy (brief report)

We provide key facts about the TRADR project deployment of ground and aerial robots in Amatrice, Italy, after the major earthquake in August 2016. The robots were used to collect data for 3D textured models of the interior and exterior of two badly damaged churches of high national heritage valu