Assessing fire frequency and structural fire behaviour of England statistics according to BS PD 7974-7

Manes, Martina ORCID: 0000-0003-2302-1720 and Rush, David (2021) Assessing fire frequency and structural fire behaviour of England statistics according to BS PD 7974-7. FIRE SAFETY JOURNAL, 120. p. 103030.

XML Word Processing Document (DOCX)
FISJ_2020_127 Manes Rush.docx - Author Accepted Manuscript
Download (2MB)

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2020.103030

Abstract

Contemporary structural fire statistics are fundamental in engineering design practice to evaluate likelihood and consequence of fire for different property types, and to investigate how different safety measures impact fire spread. British Standard PD 7974-7:2003 has recently been updated using USA fire statistics; this paper compares PD 7974-7:2003 to current England statistics (named UK statistics) using one public and one Home Office dataset. PD 7974-7:2003 overestimates fire frequency with values up to 5 times greater than the ones found in UK and USA. When fire frequency is plotted against total floor space, for different property types, power laws with positive or negative exponent and polynomial functions provide better approximations of the data than the current codes. Average area damage from PD 7974-7:2003 has been compared to fire and total damage from UK datasets where fire size is usually well confined to room of origin at 20% of fires based on the publicly available dataset. When fires exceeding specific areas of damage are considered, PD 7974-7:2003 usually overestimates fire damage and underestimates total damage, with more damage evident when sprinklers are absent compared to when they are present.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Fire statistics, Fire frequency, Fire damage, Total damage, Fire safety systems, Sprinklers, Probabilistic design
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	07 Dec 2022 10:07
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2023 19:41
DOI:	10.1016/j.firesaf.2020.103030
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3166530