The application of compartmentation

Howard Passey takes a look at surveying a?building’s compartmentation and ways to?ensure compliance for passive fire protection.

Compartmentation is a crucial passive fire safety measure, consisting of essential elements of the building fabric that act to limit the spread of fire and smoke around a premises.

This is achieved through the provision of fire-resisting walls and floors offering between 30 and 120 minutes of fire resistance – with measures included to address any openings in the compartment lines, such as doors, glazing, service penetrations, and ductwork.

The degree of compartmentation required in each building is dependent upon several factors including:

• building use and associated fire load – impacts the likelihood of a fire starting and its severity
• building height – the height of the top storey above ground level impacts both life safety and firefighting perspectives
• presence (or otherwise) of sprinklers – impacts on the maximum size of compartments, depending upon occupancy type.

Alongside active fire safety measures such as fire detection, emergency lighting, and premises fire safety management, passive fire safety measures form one of the cornerstones of national Building Regulations in the support of ensuring the building’s safe evacuation of occupants in the event of a fire.

As part of the Fire Protection Association's continuing commitment to increase fire safety awareness across the built environment, a number of informative feature articles are available to read on our website.?You can read the full article here.