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Transparent options? The considerations to be made about fire resistant glazing are not limited to whether or not to specify it. Colin Bennett sheds some light on a topic that is less transparent than it seems.

Article Excerpt
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GLASS HAS ALWAYS BEEN AN IMPORTANT BUILDING material. It allows natural light into the building and there appears to be a general trend in modern buildings to introduce more and more glazing. This is most noticeable in hospitals and schools, where designs are moving away from the more institutionalised ones of the past, which consisted of a series of dark uninspiring corridors and rooms. As well as being required to satisfy design criteria--ranging from environmental/energy efficiency to impact safety and acoustic requirements--there can also be important fire safety implications the fire safety engineer needs to take onboard when developing the fire strategy, as the glazed elements can form part of the compartment walls and floors, protected enclosures and atria.

One of the most important aspects of a fire safety strategy is to develop compartmentation for a building. This needs to be coordinated with the available means of escape and fire service access, together with the type of use and level of management within a building. This is particularly important in hospitals, where progressive horizontal evacuation is usually adopted and also in schools, where compartment sizes can be relatively small, i.e. Building Bulletin 100 recommends that compartments should be a maximum of 800[m.sup.2] in a non-sprinklered school.

Early start

It is therefore critical for the fire safety engineer to be involved in the design at a very early stage, and identify any glazing application that needs to be fire resistant, either integrity only or integrity with insulation. In the early stages of a design, it is generally easier to reconfigure where the fire compartmentation is placed and this can reduce the...

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