The worldwide and continuing success of the Mini has caused BMW to expand the production facilities at Plant Oxford, the only place in the world where the Mini is made.
The largest single project is to extend the body in white facility. This is where body pressings are brought in from outside, made into sub-assemblies and then ultimately assembled into the full body shell.
The new building will cover 15,000 square metres. And at 15 metres high, it will house three levels of conveyors. Its production cells will use robots fed by conveyors.
Rolton Group is working alongside BMW as Principal Contractors, project designers and managers and also worked with the client on the development of a new fire strategy, providing specialist technical input.
The fire team was asked to assess the fireload (the expected heat outputs) and fire growth rates, for different parts of the plant. They conducted an extensive survey of the current body in white plant and then focused their attention on three areas of the plant.
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They looked at the physical makeup of the equipment and resources used and analysed the number of different materials used in the three areas, and the quantities of each that were present. By allocating a standard fireload to each material and referencing the load to the quantities of each material in the areas the team used a weighted average to produce a figure for the fireload for each area. The team produced an energy output rating for the amount of energy each piece of equipment would generate if it were to burn.
They then calculated the amount of time it would take a fire to compromise the safety of the building's occupants using in-house software to demonstrate the effect of the spread of fire and smoke on a second-by-second basis.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can also be used to model these scenarios. The Rolton Fire team checked the results of its findings with the same model running on CFD modelling software created at Greenwich University and found that the results tallied accurately.
The development of Plant Oxford is expected to be completed in 2006.
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