“Finalist for the Pinders Awards 2013.”
Project
A four storey development of assisted living residential suites for senior citizens, including a self-contained dementia facility.
Challenges
The design did not meet prescriptive guidance.
Solutions
Our innovative, holistic, fire engineering approach demonstrated how the fire strategy could deviate from prescriptive guidance. Our design enabled a homely free flowing environment with the flexibility of having bedrooms as inner rooms.
We designed an ‘L5’ fire engineered fire alarm system to ensure the alarm worked in conjunction with the ‘stay put’ evacuation procedure of evacuating only the occupants in the room of the fire’s origin. The ‘stay-put’ evacuation procedure was proposed in order to facilitate the movement of residents with limited mobility and also reduce disruption in the event of a false alarm.
CFD modelling was used to show that the proposed design offered greater protection than prescriptive guidance. We also utilised CFD to optimise the requirements of the hybrid mechanical/natural smoke control system to meet performance based criteria.