Our fire engineers at Omega Fire have worked upon many residential and mixed use projects across the globe. These have included, high rise and super high rise buildings within the UK and internationaloverseas that have combined private and commercial living spaces within the same structure as large commercial/public environments and subterranean parking spaces.
With residential developments, the available floor space is a critical factor which can establish the financial viability of such schemes. The use of fire engineering at the initial concept stage will allow critical design parameters to be established such as; number of stair cores and location, compartmentation issues and strategic exit locations, it will also allow fundamental fire engineering approaches to be agreed from the outset which can provide an element of cost certainty as well as streamlining the approvals process.
With residential developments the key is to provide a differentiator that sets the development apart from other rival developments on the market. One such way to achieve this is to provide open plan apartments, which are highly desirable to prospective purchasers. The provision of such apartments is in contravention to the recommendations of the prescriptive guidance documents as there is no compartmentation to prevent smoke from cutting off the means of escape. Our engineers use advanced fire engineering techniques such as computational modelling and probabilistic analysis to demonstrate the safety of the open plan design, and ultimately to achieve Building Regulations approval for them. Omega Fire can provide advice at any stage of the development to determine whether the use of open plan apartments is achievable.
Residential