Fire Safety Consultants work for Queen Mary’s New School for Dentistry and Medicine
Every year, Fire Safety Engineering magazine sponsors an award for fire consultancies that demonstrate best practice in the fire safety design of buildings. The top fire engineering consultancies send in details of their best projects and a panel of experts chooses the winner. In 2004 Exova Warringtonfire consulting submitted a project that they had been working on that was an unusual design and which made use of a range of fire engineering techniques.
The project was the Queen Mary’s New School for Dentistry and Medicine designed by Alsops Architects. The project involved providing a fire safety strategy which included: evacuation analysis, CFD smoke flow analysis, external fire spread radiation analysis and structural fire protection analysis. The aim being to provide a design of building that would be acceptable to the appropriate authorities with no reduction in the standard of fire safety.
The resulting design is one that could not have been made using a traditional ‘code compliant’ approach. Working closely with the statutory authorities and undertaking a fire engineering analysis for the building as a whole has resulted in the acceptance of an innovative and radical solution to the building’s design.
