Fire Safety Engineering Research and Technology Centre (FireSERT) University of Ulster: Recent Developments

The Institute of Fire Safety Engineering Research and Technology Centre (FireSERT) at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland has been a major provider of higher technical fire safety education, fire related research and services to industry for over 20 years. Its internationally recognised research spans the fields of fire dynamics, structural fire engineering, human behaviour in fire and more recently fire (CFD) modelling. Since 1991, it has offered the only PG Dip/MSc Fire Safety Engineering programme in the United Kingdom. In September 2000 FireSERT was the recipient of a £5.7 m Joint Infrastructure Fund (JIF) Award to build new fire safety engineering laboratories on the University's Jordanstown campus. These new facilities unparallel in the University sector in the UK offer greater scope and depth to the FireSERT's research portfolios. The new facilities will be extensively used in support of FireSERT's suite of MSc Fire Safety Engineering and DPhil programmes. This paper presents a brief history of FireSERT and its achievements, together with an update on the new facility, current research themes, taught programmes, research opportunities and visions for the future.     

火灾科学与消防工程学发展现状及学科体系构架

火灾科学与消防工程学具备火灾科学、消防技术和消防工程所形成的完整知识体系，其下属学科包括火灾学、防火工程、灭火工程、消防管理工程、消防指挥学、火灾调查学及其他相关学科。消防风险管理研究、火灾模化技术、火灾心理和火灾行为以及消防可靠性数据的研究将成为新世纪火灾科学与消防工程学的优先研究领域。     

关于用ISO 9705评价材料的火焰传播

虽然性能化规范尚未达到通用的程度 ,但中国香港建筑业消防安全条款已用于“工程方法”设计中 ,在回顾了四个标准试验 ,即 ASTM E1 32 1 - 97a、BS4 76 :Part:1 997、ASTM E84 -99/ NFPA2 5 5和 ISO970 5 :1 993(E)之后 ,介绍了 ISO970 5 ,供地方政府评估各种材料的火焰传播。为妥善处理新的建筑材料 ,应将材料和构件的火焰传播试验列入说明中     

A proposed fire safety ranking system for karaoke establishments and its comparison with the NFPA-fire safety evaluation system

A fire safety ranking system (FSRS), excluding the fire safety management at the moment, is proposed for assessing the fire safety provisions for existing karaoke establishments in Hong Kong. The objective is to investigate how far existing karaokes deviate from the expectation of new codes. Suitable fire safety management can then be worked out based on the scores. There are three attributes in the FSRS grouped as the key parameters for local fire safety requirements, passive building design and active fire protection systems. From the results of a survey carried out in May 2000, fire safety of 19 karaokes is rated by studying their architectural features and interior details. The results are compared with those by the National Fire Protection Association-Fire Safety Evaluation System (NFPA-FSES) on the part on fire safety parameters. Apart from dealing with fire spreading for interior finish, the proposed FSRS and NFPA-FSES are similar. The study of 19 of the existing karaoke establishments shows that the assessed level of fire safety is similar to the result of an assessment using the modified American system of evaluation.     

中外土木工程防灾专业工程结构抗火课程比较研究

灾害防治是土木工程专业必须考虑的重要课题,对保护人身、财产安全起关键作用。火灾是发生频率最高、造成损失最严重的灾害之一,因此工程结构抗火不可忽视。文章主要分析了工程结构抗火课程的发展情况,以同济大学、重庆大学、武汉大学、东南大学、香港理工大学、伊利诺伊大学香槟分校等高校为例,在课程设置、课程要求和课程内容等方面对其进行讨论和研究,发现高校对教学重视程度的不同极大影响课程教学内容的选择和最终的教学效果。根据比较研究的结果,提出适合中国国情的教学改革方案。     

A Fire Safety Evaluation System for Prioritizing Fire Improvements in Old High-rise Buildings in Hong Kong

Fire safety in old high-rise buildings is of great concern to the general public as a result of several big fires occurred over the past 10 years. A fire safety evaluation system is essential for building engineers to quantify the fire safety level, to identify the measures to be improved and to schedule the corresponding improvements. Together with a scoring system with weighting factors derived for local buildings, this paper proposes a universal fire safety evaluation (FSE) checklist for fire safety level quantification and improvements prioritization in old high-rise buildings. In a survey, the fire safety levels of 122 old high-rise buildings in Hong Kong were quantified using the scoring system. The survey results showed that only less than 5% of the inspected samples reached the standard required for life safety. The FSE checklist was then applied to prioritize the improvement works of 10 selected buildings with the lowest scores.     

Study of attitude changes in people after the implementation of a new safety management system: the supervision plan

The construction industry of Hong Kong has a very poor site safety record. The overall accident rate has gone down a little during the last few years, but the number of fatalities has risen dramatically. In the past, the Hong Kong Government adopted a laissez-faire approach in managing construction safety, hoping that market forces would regulate the safety performance. However, the approach has proved to be ineffective. Since 1986, the Government has taken a proactive approach in combating construction site safety, and has introduced a series of safety programmes, which consist of encouraged and mandatory schemes aiming at nourishing a proper safety culture in the construction industry. Recently, the Government decided to criminalize site accident cases by introducing a so-called ‘Supervision Plan’, aiming at changing the safety attitude and culture of construction practitioners. This paper applies an attitude-changing model, ‘reinforcement theory’, to predict the changing attitude of people in the construction industry. The results show that the attitude of construction practitioners in Hong Kong will change to be more positive when they receive more messages to confirm that people really are put into jail for negligence under the Supervision Plan.     

Fire research in the 21st century

This annual ‘Fire Research Lecture’ was delivered on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Fire Research Station. Presented on 2 October 1997, it briefly traces the history of FRS from its foundation in 1947 to the current status following its privatisation in March 1997. The lecture reviews the current maturity of the disciplines of fire safety science and engineering and then provides the author’s personal view of the research requirements for the next century as driven by scientific progress and by economic and social change.     

建筑环境与设备工程专业宽口径大类培养探索——中外大学培养模式对比分析

文章简述了国内建筑环境与设备工程专业特色建设的情况,将国内的培养计划与课程设置与英国、香港、美国等国家与地区各高校相应专业进行了比较.发现国内建环专业课程深度不足,学科之间交叉不够,培养的学生知识面较窄.为了实现教育部"厚基础、宽口径"的培养目标,国内的建环专业尚需增加涉及建筑学、结构、声学、电气、消防、给排水、燃气等方面的专业平台课,以打通目前存在的专业壁垒.     

Environmental performance assessment in China and Hong Kong

Environmental Management System (EMS) has recently been advocated for almost all economic sectors. However, the implementation of EMS is problematic for the construction industry. The greatest obstacle is the lack of objective performance evaluation criteria. To overcome this, Environmental Performance Assessment (EPA) has been introduced, to provide assessments in terms of management and operational systems. This paper compares the status of EPA implementation in China and Hong Kong. By means of a questionnaire survey, the difficulties in implementing EPA are highlighted, the major ones being ‘Lack of technological support, such as training, staff and expertise’ and ‘Lack of commitment from senior staff’ in Hong Kong and Mainland China, respectively. Furthermore, ‘Lack of legal enforcement’ is found more profound in Mainland China than in Hong Kong, indicated by a low correlation coefficient between the rankings of these factors in Hong Kong and China. Meanwhile, ‘Promoting EPA as a legal requirements’ and ‘Inclusion of EPA in the tendering requirements’ are found to be the best tools for encouraging implementation of EPA. Although the difficulties in implementing EPA are different in the two regions, the motivations for EPA are similar, with a high correlation coefficient.     

The process of fire safety design—development ofFire Engineering Guidelines in Australia

Australia is quickly moving toward adopting performance-based regulations for building fire safety. This approach offers owners and designers more flexibility, greater opportunity for innovation, and more cost-effective construction.To help introduce a performance approach, the Fire Code Reform Centre has developedFire Engineering Guidelines, which document an agreed methodology for performance-based design and draws on earlier Australian research and similar developments in a number of countries.The guidelines are the first step in a broader research program to develop a full risk assessment methodology as the basis for fire safety design in Australia.     

Genetic algorithm model in optimizing the use of labour

The construction industry is characterized by the existence of multiple trades and crafts. With the existence of multiple-tiers of labour-only-subcontracting in Hong Kong, tradesmen are normally assigned to tasks of a narrowly defined skill. Lately, there has been a call for the adoption of a directly employed labour scheme by the Hong Kong Housing Authority and the public works departments in Hong Kong in order to improve both safety and quality. However, current industry practice has hindered the adoption of directly employed labour, which requires assigning tradesmen to broadly defined task groupings. In implementing the scheme, the first thing to be resolved is how to maximize the levels of use of workers, because that is the major financial incentive to encourage contractors to adopt the directly employed labour policy. This coupled with the shortage of some skilled craft workers call into question the traditionally accepted ‘single-skilled’ or ‘single-task’ approach in labour deployment. A genetic algorithm model is developed to optimize the labour deployment and practical examples are presented. The optimization results are very promising, confirming the practical application value of the model.     

施工企业信息化项目管理体系研究

依据中国建筑工程总公司的全资子公司香港中国海外集团有限公司多年从事国际承包工程管理的经验,总结出以工程质量、安全、环保、进度、成本等5个核心元素为管理目标,以解决施工企业决策层、管理层、项目层对工程的协同管理要求,通过信息化的手段实施工程项目的动态管理,提高施工企业国际工程管理现代化水平、提高经济与社会效益、增强我国施工企业国际承包工程竞争实力.     

A Fire Safety Assessment System for Existing Buildings

In Hong Kong which is characterized by its tall, reinforced-concrete buildings with multiple owners, most of the high-rise buildings constructed before the mid-1970s are dilapidated. In order to address this problem, the Hong Kong Government intends to introduce mandatory safety assurance requirements with its so-called Building Safety Inspection Scheme, under which building owners would be required to appoint building professionals to assess the safety level of their buildings and to recommend appropriate corrective actions. In order to ensure uniform standards and easy administration, the Hong Kong Government intends to publish assessment guidelines. One of the major safety aspects the guidelines will addresses is fire safety, since, over the past few years, several large, tragic fires have occurred in the city's high-rises. This article proposes a fuzzy fire safety assessment approach based on fire risk ranking techniques that may form part of the safety evaluation tool for existing buildings. The basic principles of the system are briefly described, and its implementation is outlined.     

香港特区塔机市场及安全管理

自2008年金融海啸后,香港十大基建工程陆续上马,包括数个铁路项目、跨境基建、西九文化区和新发展区建设,以改善香港市民的居住环境和发展的持续性,特区政府逐年加大建筑工程投资额度,在抓紧落实十大基建工程项目的同时,积极推进中小基建项目。另外私人发展商推出的商品住宅和商用写字楼落成量也大幅度回升,香港的建筑业自2011年已进入了一个比较繁荣的高峰期。     

Risk analysis of fire and evacuation events in the European railway transport network

According to international and national guidance (ISO 23932 [1] and the Fire Engineering Design Brief (FEDB)), the selection of the design fire scenario (DFS) is one of the major steps of fire safety engineering methodology. Once the DFS is chosen, its fire performance is evaluated through a fire analysis method in order to meet the fire safety objectives. Two DFS have been previously pre-selected by railway fire safety experts, during the Transfeu project, on the basis of their relevance and feedback. The relative fire risk analysis aims to test how valid and representative are the pre-selected DFS. Its method consists in finding a large number of possible fire sequences, from fire start to fire spread, in railway transportation. To identify these events succession, risk analysis tools such as events trees are used. The fire risk analysis result is a matrix of relative occurrence probabilities versus relative severities. The positions of the pre-selected DFS in the matrix are compared with the large number of fire scenarios. The method and results of the fire risk analysis are discussed in this paper. The main result is that the pre-selected DFS have a serious risk. These DFS are then used in a detailed quantitative assessment to predict the impact of fire on people in a train vehicle.     

Comparison of engineering costs of raw freshwater, reclaimed water and seawater for toilet flushing in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is one of the very few coastal cities in the world that use ‘dual water supply systems’. Dual water supply involves two distribution systems: a freshwater system for potable use and a seawater system for toilet flushing. This study looks into the feasibility, from an engineering cost point of view, of extending seawater supply into districts where potable water is still being used for toilet flushing, including South District of Hong Kong Island, Sai Kung, Northern New Territories and Northwest New Territories. Besides seawater, raw (untreated) freshwater and reclaimed water (treated effluent from local sewage treatment works) are also considered to be used for toilet flushing for these districts. Six cases are developed for comparison by using the lowest net present value of cost criterion. The result shows that using seawater for toilet flushing in these districts has the best engineering economy.     

Uncertainty in Estimating the Fire Control Effectiveness of Sprinklers from New Zealand Fire Incident Reports

The current state of fire sprinkler effectiveness information has been found to be a limiting factor when comparing the fire risk for alternative building designs in New Zealand (Determination 2005/109: single means of escape from a high-rise apartment building. Department of Building and Housing, Wellington, 7). Data on the past performance of systems in real fires is one of the best sources of information to estimate future performance, but there has not been a detailed study on sprinkler effectiveness data from fire incidents in New Zealand published since Marryatt’s work (Fire: a century of automatic sprinkler protection-revised. Australian Fire Protection Association, Melbourne, 13), which was last updated in 1986 and included data from Australia. The current research looks at the quality and quantity of data available on sprinkler effectiveness from New Zealand Fire Service (NZFS) incident reports over the period of 2001 to 2010 to evaluate the data’s usefulness for risk-informed building fire safety design. A comparison is made between the number of sprinklers reported activated in the NZFS dataset, Marryatt’s study, guidance from PD 7974-7:2003 (PD 7974-7:2003: the application of fire safety engineering principles to fire safety design of buildings. Probabilistic Risk Assessment, London, 3), and NFPA data (U.S. experience with sprinklers and other automatic fire extinguishing equipment. National Fire Protection Association, Quincy, 12). Proposals to improve the collection and reporting process to increase the informative value of future NZFS data for risk-informed fire safety design are presented.