Cabins And Islands: A Fire Protection Strategy For An International Airport Terminal Building

Abstract

For architectural and functional reasons, transport terminal buildings are frequently designed to incorporate large uncompartmented spaces. Fire resisting walls as means of limiting fire and smoke spread within these large spaces are therefore absent. This paper shows how fire safety may be achieved nevertheless for the case of a very large airport terminal building to be built in Osaka Bay in Japan. The fire safety strate~y relies essentially on two designed features. The first of these is that the areas of high fire load such as shops are limited in extent and well defined. It was proposed therefore that these areas should be protected separately by sprinklers and provided with a dedicated smoke extract on system. This is known as the "cabin concept". Secondly, areas of combustible material, including seating, tend to be well separated with large circulation spaces in between. By considering radiation from a severe fire in each such area, it was shown that fire spread between them was not a problem. This was termed the "island concept". This paper describes the calculations carried out and the results obtained. The design fires adopted, and many of the calculation procedures used were taken from the new Japanese Integrated Design Method for Fire Protection.

Proposed fire safety strategy on airport terminals

“…On the fixed fire load, it depends on the combustibles used in the building materials (Beever, 1993). Site visits have indicated that there are not many fixed combustibles such as partition materials with timber product.…”

“…the cabin design (Beever, 1993) are the issues. Based on the survey of Chow and Ng (2004), some retail shops are selling alcohols and cigarettes, a higher fire risk would be posed if those stocks are too large.…”

“…If large quantities of these materials are used, heat release rate upon burning those materials and the resulted flame spreading over their surfaces must be studied. For the movable fire load, the amount of combustibles carried by passengers are argued to be not too large (Beever, 1993), if the fire safety strategy is only for protecting against accidental fires (Fire Services Department, 1998). However, possibility of having fires resulted from larger transient fire load density should not be neglected.…”

“…Chow, 2002a;Beever, 1993) is commonly used. Generally speaking, the 'cabin' concept is a good design to protect the areas of high fire load in big halls and allow better space allocation.…”

A Study on the Awareness of Fire Safety Measures for Users and Staff of Shopping Malls: The Case of Mlimani City and Quality Centre in Dar es Salaam

“…Chow [2] identified fire safety provisions for super tall buildings. Beever [3] proposed "cabins" and "islands" as a fire protection strategy for an international airport terminal building. Sutula and Ryder [4] proposed the use of cone calorimeter to test relevant material properties and material performance data for green building construction.…”