FEATURE FIRE SAFETY
FLEXIBILITY WITHIN COMPLEXITY L
As Keith Minster, sales manager UK and Ireland, Morley-IAS by Honeywell explains, the complex and diverse nature of manufacturing environments means that their fire safety solutions need to be specialist and flexible to ensure early detection
ooking at smaller scale manufacturing in the first instance, the emphasis, typically, is on protecting the plant or warehouse rather than the process itself. Here, in response to the often fluid, diverse nature of manufacturing and warehouse environments and the tight operating budgets, a fire safety system should ideally combine flexibility with cost effectiveness. Here, a fire alarm control panel offering a flexible, open protocol, network capability is often well suited to meet the needs of production and warehousing sites which may be subject to change of use or in linking to other units where additional capacity is required. In addition, manufacturing fire safety systems also need to be intuitive and simple enough for facilities managers or other company staff to operate.
HIGH BAY WAREHOUSES AND RACKING Technological developments have enabled today’s fire safety technology to be installed in what were previously considered difficult environments to protect, including high bay warehouses. Where there are high ceilings, system
designers often choose beam detectors that transmit a beam of light across the building and are effective in detecting rising smoke. In buildings that contain racking, the use of an aspirating or ‘air sampling’ system can protect not only the rack itself but also the high bay area of the warehouse. At high levels, pipes replace the more
traditional detectors and air from the ceiling is drawn into the detector, typically situated at an easily accessible lower level. A major advantage of the use of this aspirating or ‘air sampling’ technology is that the person responsible for maintaining these devices does not need to physically get up to the ceiling as the smoke detector itself sits at a lower level. Ultimately, this makes maintaining the device not only easier but also more
12 SEPTEMBER 2014 | ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
cost effective as the maintenance engineer does not have to use a cherry picker or scaffolding to access the detector.
SITE SPECIFIC DESIGN As with any
other site, fire detection and alarm
systems for warehouses or manufacturing sites must
be designed and installed around the specific needs and uses of the building. Depending on the appropriate risk assessment, this could include, for instance, the use of point style detectors in the office areas and aspirating systems in the warehouse.
In designing a system for
manufacturing and warehouse sites, engineers need to pay close attention not only to the physical characteristics of the building, but also how it is used and how this varies throughout the day and night. During normal operating hours, for example, steam would be unlikely to trigger an alarm, depending on the particle size, but the use of materials such as spray paint may well have an impact. During the night, the likelihood of an alarm being triggered by a source other than a real fire is far lower. A range of other factors must also be
considered, including, for example, the potential impact of diesel fumes in sites where lorries need to reverse into loading bays. In other cases, gas fired heaters may affect some types of detectors.
MINIMISING DISRUPTION In responding to these specific needs, control panels that can work with different manufacturers’ hardware are often preferred as they offer flexibility in terms of the detectors they control. Scalability is also important and, as fire
Left and below: today’s fire safety technology has evolved to the point where it can now be more intelligently installed in what were previously considered difficult environments to protect
Bottom: fire detection and alarm systems for warehouses or manufacturing sites must be designed and installed around the specific needs and uses of the building
system technology has developed, so has the scale of network capability, enabling very large systems to be implemented. Crucially, using modern fire safety technology, system designers are able to utilise the advanced ‘cause and effect’ capabilities of the fire alarm control panel. These can be used, for example, to directly control fire compartmentation measures and smoke control systems as well as automatic shutdown of plant. Combining this with a staged alarm strategy means that, when a potential fire is initially detected, a warning is triggered, but the system will not signal an evacuation or take further actions until a fire is confirmed either by a manual call point or a second detector signalling fire. This is especially important from a cost perspective as, in some instances, over reaction to a fire alert can be just as costly to the business as a failure to react promptly. For this reason, enabling an early warning could save the plant or warehouse time and money by avoiding the risk of an excessive response. PC-based fire safety visualisation tools also offer site managers and
operations teams flexibility in the day to day management of industrial fire safety systems, especially at larger sites. Crucially, the user has visibility of where each detector is located and is able to manage them. Such tools not only provide essential information such as where the fire is situated, but also highlight any precautions that need to be considered if, for instance, the particular area in question is known to contain hazardous materials. As well as having visibility over the entire system, after the situation has been dealt with, the site manager will have access to detailed information about the incident which could be used to guard against future incidents, or highlight areas where the response could be improved.
Morley-IAS by Honeywell
www.morley-ias.co.uk T: 01273 897 000
Enter 203 / ELECTRICALENGINEERING
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