When Honda wanted to extend the paint shop at its Swindon plant, it turned to Rolton Group to provide a range of engineering services, to support the project.
Among those was the requirement to reassess and update the company's fire strategy for the paint area. A fire strategy is a formal statement of how an organisation addresses the needs of stakeholders, such as staff, emergency services, insurers and the company itself in the event of a fire.
The plan called for a two-storey extension to the paint area. Rolton Fire reviewed the existing strategy and produced an addendum that set out how the new part of the plant would conform to the original strategy and to general principles of the Building Regulations.
Building regulations say that occupants must always be within a prescribed distance of a fire exit. The increased size of the paint area meant that employees faced the prospect of greater distances to exits in the event of a fire. The Rolton approach used alternative compliance to show that although workers would be beyond the normal recommended safe distance, the time it would take them to escape meant that the building would still be compliant.
The team did this by using its own in-house software to model the effects of fires in different parts of the building.
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Associate Director Stuart Holroyd says: Our analysis reflected the geometry and interconnection of the spaces between the ground and the upper levels, to predict the likely movement and volume of smoke within the building.
The team used the fireloads (the expected heat outputs) for different areas of the plant, set out in the original strategy. They then used those findings to create different fire scenarios. The result showed how quickly smoke would spread, according to where a fire started, on a second-by-second basis and when each fire would compromise the safety of occupants in different locations. The analysis builds in the kinds of factors involved in a real fire; the time to detect the fire, a time for investigation and an evacuation time that takes account of the fact that people may at first leave a building and head towards, rather than away from, a fire.
Although escape distances had increased beyond the figures set out, the analysis showed that escape times were safely within the time for the space within the building to become untenable.
The Fire team worked closely throughout the project with other teams from Rolton Group, which provided assistance and support on project design, civil and structural, and mechanical and electrical engineering on the project, which was completed in 2005.
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