Fire Safety Engineering

If a building cannot comply with the legal obligations due to its characteristics (constructions, materials used, …), you can draw on the Fire Safety Engineering department to examine if an equivalent degree of protection may be obtained. Fire Safety Engineering uses Computional Fluid Dynamics (CFD) programs to examine e.g. the behaviour of fire and the smoke spread. By means of simulations realistic fire scenarios are checked against the characteristics typical for the building.

The Fire Safety Engineering department can therefore be contacted in the following situations :

• Evaluating the stability of the supporting construction in case of fire and guaranteeing the public’s safety. Both the passive fire protection (fire resistance of a building element and reaction to fire of a building product) and the active fire protection (detection, automatic extinction and smoke extraction) (if applicable) are taken into account fort his evaluation.
• Preparing the derogation file to be presented to the Equivalence and Derogation Commission of the FPS Home Affairs in order to obtain a derogation of the normative legislation.
• Perform Peer reviews of Performance Based Design reports as an independent third party.

The above-mentioned situations are only a limited presentation of the role Fire Safety Engineering can play in the complete building process. Every building has its specific charactericts and can thus require a different approach. It is therefore recommended to contact us for a personal approach of the construction method.

Furthermore, ISIB is member of Firepronet vzw, the Fire Safety Engineering alumni and student association of University Gent.