Fire Safety in Design and Construction

This chapter will outline engineering design considerations for new plant projects or expansion as related to specific areas of fire protection and suppression. Fire safety can be incorporated into facility design in several different ways. One way is to require that the building be designed strictly to specification codes, such as building codes or military and government specifications. Another way to incorporate fire safety is to use performance codes. These codes try to overcome the inflexibility of specification codes by defining the expected fire safety performance of a separate component of the design and allowing alternative ways to meet the design. Design decisions have an effect on the facility’s fire protection, which creates a compelling argument for the early introduction of fire protection engineering into the design process. The construction types currently in use have Roman numerals for the type and a notational system for the fire resistance rating.