Fire safety engineering with a performance-based approach to designing fire safety has grown as a result of the increasing demand for large, complex and unusual buildings. Architects have not been prepared to conform to a prescriptive design to enable fire engineers to sign off the designs easily The fire industry has had a distinct choice; to either demand that buildings are designed and built to the tight restrictions of the Building Regulations and relevant British Standards, or to come up with a method of evaluation to allow novel building design. Fortunately the conservative fire industry has chosen the latter, even if there were - and are - many diehards who hate the idea of performance-based fire engineering. So perhaps the answer to the problem for new product certification is not to rely on the big certification bodies to get around to the new idea, but trust certain qualified and experienced individuals or companies to 'certify' against a set of 'performance-based' rules. British Standard Specification PAS 911 contains one such method by promoting consideration of technologies against a set of three criterion; technical performance, logistics, and economics. Perhaps safety could be added to this list but the idea is that this would provide a quick and effective way for new ideas to be used.
展开▼
