(Newswire.net — August 16, 2021) — Passive fire protection is one of the most important components of fire safety strategies. Passive fire protection is basically built into the building in order to safeguard people’s lives as well as limit the financial damage or asset damage to the buildings and their contents. Passive fire protection does this by:
- Minimalizing the speed of fire and smoke spread in individual compartments.
- Creating and implementing fire escape routes for the essential means of escape
- Protecting the building structure by employing the right firestop products and firestop sealants thereby ensuring the building’s sustainability and safety
The Passive Fire Protection System divides the building structure into smaller compartments to make the risk management and reduce the spread of fire to further parts of the construction. These areas, where the passive fire protection system is implemented, will allow the occupants in these buildings to evacuate easier and offer the firefighters better protection. These protection measures need not be added in or manually operated in order to do their work as once these passive fire protection methods do their work since their implementation. The overall fire resistance of the building is greatly improved by the various firestop products built into the compartments and the entire building.
Different methods and areas of passive fire protection
There are different methods and types of passive fire protection and the way each of these works is different. Some of the most common passive fire protection methods are:
- Fire Resistance
A higher fraction of the fire protection products does the role of fire-resisting. These firestop products will resist fire for a particular period of time and resist the structural collapse of the buildings, resist the spread of smoke and dangerous gases, and resist the conduction of heat.
Most of the firestop products and materials used in passive fire protection tend to have natural fire-resistant features like pre-build fire protection. In materials like timber, the fire and heat conduction is lesser, but the chances of timber catching fire are higher. Hence, in areas like these, it is essential to have fire-resistant boards to protect the timber.
- Structural fire protection
The structural fire protection essentially guards the components that play a vital part in giving the building its structure, like the joint systems. This is made possible by using fireproofing materials or concreting the building structures.
- Compartmentation
Firewalls, fire partitions, fire and smoke barriers, etc come inside compartmentation. The role of compartmentation is to limit the fire spread by dividing the building into further smaller structures or compartments and establishing fire protection methods to limit the spread of fire, smoke, and fumes from one compartment to another.
- Opening or Initial fire protection
In the opening of a fire barrier, fire doors and windows will be installed in order to maintain the fire resistance. The doors and windows along with the hardware plays an important role to form a barrier between the structure and the fire.
Fire resistance is further ensured by the duct systems that are commonly considered to be the important parts of the opening fire protection systems. Additionally, fire-rated framing and glasses as well are used to ensure better passive fire protection.
- Firestop products and materials
These are the substances that limit the fire from spreading through the barriers. Even if a fire breakout happens in the building, these firestop products will give you enough time to evacuate and safeguard your lives and other valuable assets.
It is important to check whether all the passive fire protection products are working properly to avoid any mishappenings at times of fire spread.