Travelodge, Great Ducie Street

The proposed layout for this building was a 7 storey hotel development with a total of 200 double bedrooms and a cafe/bar on the ground floor.

Innovation Fire Engineering developed an alternative approach to fire safety by utilising natural ventilation to justify a single direction of travel of up to 21m within the corridors.  Additionally, our innovative solution allowed us to optimise the fire design and remove 11 cross corridors to provide our client with a significant cost saving. By using CFD modelling, we were able to demonstrate that our proposed design would produce a lower level of risk than following prescriptive guidance. This also enabled us to design performance based automatic vents which could be suitably sized to adhere to planning constraint restrictions.

Innovation Fire Engineering took a proactive approach to optimising the fire design by reducing the fire resistance requirements to all structural elements from 90 to 60 minutes, which provided significant cost savings. We also marked up all the hotel drawings with the optimal level of fire resistance to achieve Building Regulations, in order to prevent over specification and increased cost to our client.

We resolved the issue of merging the staircase escape routes at ground floor level in the most cost effective manner, through strategic fire resistance and designing an ‘L5’ fire engineered fire alarm system to provide hotel occupants with early warning in the event of fire.