the home of fire safety engineering and design practices

What is Fire Safety Engineering?

Fire safety engineering is the application of science and engineering principles to the design and practise of protecting against the unwanted effects of fire.  It is most usually applied to the protection of buildings, but is also applicable to other structures, industrial plant, ships and marine, and transport systems.  The use of fire safety engineering can produce optimum solutions with regard to cost and design restrictions while still providing necessary protection for people and the built and natural environment.

 

Fire safety is a more general term than fire safety engineering and also includes the use of prescriptive and legislative guidance to produce appropriate fire protection packages, to conduct fire safety risk assessments, and to provide fire safety training.  Given the great variety of fire protection equipment, methods and products available, determining the most suitable in any given situation is not easy for the lay person.

 

Fire investigation is a specialism within fire safety engineering concerned with the investigation of fires after they have occurred, and in particular to ascertain, where possible, the most likely cause.

Choosing a fire safety and fire safety engineering consultant

 

Fire safety is a specialist discipline.  Only those qualified and experienced in its application are fully able to determine the best fire protection solutions in any particular case.  Unless a company has such expertise in house it will be obliged to  seek it elsewhere.  It will need to appoint a fire safety or fire safety engineering consultant.

 

In addition, although itself a specialist field, fire safety and fire safety engineering encompasses a very wide range of more specialist areas ranging, for example, from fire testing to computer modelling, and from nuclear fire safety to historic buildings.  Thus, even where a company does have some fire safety capability, it may need to augment this with more specialist expertise.

 

Given the range of expertise available, finding the appropriate fire safety consultant for any particular project is not a simple matter.

 

The Association of Fire Consultants is the trade association for independent fire consultants.  It has been established to raise awareness of the range of services available from fire safety consultants and to encourage the highest standards of professionalism.  Membership is open to all fire safety consultancies, large and small, providing they are independent of any commercial interests that could compromise their ability to provide impartial advice.  The AFC is thus a uniquely placed source of information to help in the selection of the most appropriate fire consultant.

 

All AFC members are vetted by the AFC Council and must have a minimum professional indemnity cover of £1 million for larger consultancies and £250 000 for smaller consultancies of three or less consultants.  The AFC Code of Conduct to which all members must subscribe sets strict standards of professionalism, integrity and impartiality.

 

The following are some of the services available from AFC members:

 

· Fire safety engineering design

      Advice on all types of building and structures (new and existing) is available

 

· Fire risk assessment

      The assessment of the risk of fire and determination of the adequacy of fire precautions.  These can be:

               Qualitative (eg to meet the Fire Precautions (Workplace) Regulations)

               Quantitative (in depth mathematical study to determine absolute risk)

 

· Fire safety audit and inspection

      The review of existing precautions and/or procedures against defined performance criteria

 

· Fire safety training

 

· Fire detection system selection, design and evaluation

 

· Fire suppression system selection, design and evaluation

 

· Passive fire protection selection, design and evaluation

      The protection of buildings and structures generally (but not always) using applied fire protective products and materials

 

· Product assessments

      The assessment of the performance of fire protection products and variations of these products based on fire test evidence

 

· Means of escape design and evaluation

 

· Computer modelling

 

· Preparation of fire safety standards and documentation

 

· Research projects

 

· Fire investigation

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