Feature 2 | LIFESAVING & SHIP SAFETY FIREPROOFING passenger ships
Te continuous increase in size and complexity of passenger ships has not been properly supported at the regulatory level. A rationalised fire safety framework is needed that does not penalise arrangements falling outside the constraint of past experience and that nurtures innovation
flooding (the latter primarily due to collision and grounding) constitute 90% of accidents where ships had to be abandoned, and fire frequency is some eight times higher than flooding. From a regulatory point of view, this evidence conflicts with the growing trend in the industry for more innovative ship arrangements, where size and complexity dominate the market expectations. SOLAS Ch.II-2 addressing fire safety
A
is largely based on past experience and vulnerability analysis of a selected set of fire scenarios. Steps to improve this situation have been taken with the introduction in 2002 of Regulation 17 for alternative designs, but a holistic and comprehensive treatment of fire risk has yet to appear. Te European research project entitled
Probabilistic Framework for Onboard Fire Safety project (FIREPROOF, www.
fireproof-project.eu) has set out to change this situation by developing a Risk-based Design (RBD) assessment framework. At its heart lies the holistic performance assessment of a passenger ship with respect
Figure. 2 Figure. 1
to both fire occurrence and the ensuing societal consequences.
The probabilistic framework FIREPROOF was defined as a sequel to the SAFEDOR project (
www.safedor.org) specifically addressing fire risk analysis for passenger ships. Its aim is to build on the systems and methods developed within that precursor to develop a regulatory framework capable of ensuring fire
safety of novel and existing designs through the application of the Risk Based Design methodology enabling the rational assessment of fire risk. In the context of FIREPROOF, the outcome of a fire accident is related to the societal consequences – the number of fatalities in the exposed passengers and crew onboard a ship. FIREPROOF will condense its findings
in a probabilistic framework in direct analogy to the one in SOLAS, Ch. II-1, which is currently under revision in the GOALDS project (
www.goalds.org). FIREPROOF’s findings are intended to be submitted to IMO (FP sub-committee) for discussion and further consideration. Within the probabilistic damaged stability
framework, survivability is represented by a subdivision index, which is a summation of the product of probability of flooding for each compartment and the probability of surviving flooding of that compartment. Weighting factors are included to account for the effect of different loading conditions. Similarly the FIREPROOF framework considers the probabilities of ignition within a given space, and a probability of
40 The Naval Architect October 2012
nalysis of historical accident data for passenger ships has demonstrated that
fire and
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