Should the existing comfort ventilation system be used to extract smoke and limit damage when a fire occurs in a school building? To answer this, several large-scale fire tests have been carried out. Two reports describing the findings from these tests have now been published.
In the BRAVENT project, RISE Fire Research has carried out several large-scale fire tests to document what happens when there is a fire in a school building that uses comfort ventilation for the extraction strategy. The two new reports describe the findings from these tests. Part 1 focuses on how different components of the ventilation system, such as the dampers and the filters fail when exposed to hot fire smoke. Part 2 describes the consequences these errors have for both the pressure balance in the building and the potential spread of smoke.
The reports are in Norwegian with an English summary. The reports can be read in their entirety here:
BRAVENT – Large-scale fire tests (part 1): Fire performance for non-fire rated ventilation components.
BRAVENT – Large-scale fire tests (part 2): The effect of the ventilation strategy on smoke dispersion and pressure control in a mock-up school building.
The results have also been presented in an open webinar (in Norwegian). The recording from the webinar can be found together with an earlier published webinar and all published reports from BRAVENT here:
https://risefr.no/tjenester/forskning-og-utredning/bravent
BRAVENT is an innovation project funded by the Research Council of Norway, program SAMRISK-2-Social safety and risk, project number 321099, and by the partners. The project owner is Oslobygg KF, and the project manager is RISE Fire Research. The other partners in the project are SINTEF Community, Bergen Kommune, GK Norge and TROX Auranor.