Abstract

During a fire in enclosed spaces, having structures with a good level of resistance is very important. The post flashover fire time interval, during which rescue squads operate, is important to verify if the structure can still resist fire for an acceptable time interval. This can be determined through the REI value. Hence, the way the fire develops must be examined together with the trend of the temperature that might guarantee that the structure will resist the heat flux released during the combustion. This article examines and compares, through a case study, the most important methods for analysis of the fire risk: the prescriptive approach and the simplified performance-based approach. The performance-based method (more suitable for the actual planning demand with respect to the more cautious prescriptive approach) is affected by the parameters influencing its development. The goal of this article is to provide a graph (based on parameters like the type of building, opening factor “O” and fire load “q”) that might be used by designers and architects to carry out the planning phase and adopt fire prevention systems before dealing with the assessments required by the engineering field for the fire risk analysis. View Full-Text