FOCUS
A new dawn As guidance for high rise smoke extraction
systems is lacking,Simon Plummer shows how regulatory change would improve the process For instance, the Smoke Control Association’s
C
URRENTLY, THE lack of defi nitive guidance for auditing mechanical smoke extraction designs in high rise buildings makes
it difficult to judge which solution is the most appropriate. Therefore, this article will explore why and how an extended Approved Document B of the Building Regulations (ADB) would simplify and improve the process for specifying and approving their design. Mechanically ventilated smoke shafts are
now a widely used solution in high rise buildings for protecting escape routes and maintaining adequate conditions for fi refi ghter access during an emergency. They are particularly well suited to areas with space constraints or architectural restrictions, as they take up much less room than systems that use natural ventilation. Despite their popularity, mechanical systems
do not yet appear in the Building Regulations. Unlike natural smoke shafts, these systems are instead treated as a fi re safety ‘engineered solution’. This means that each design is dealt with as an entirely new scenario and judged using the relevant sections of a number of different documents.
34 MARCH 2019
www.frmjournal.com
(SCA’s) Guidance on Smoke Control to Common Escape Routes in Apartment Buildings (Flats and Maisonettes) contains some of the acceptance benchmarks for a mechanical ventilation smoke shaft system; however, this only applies to residential developments, with no legislative counterpart for commercial or mixed use premises1
. This lack of detail and specific legislation
around the minimum performance standards that mechanical smoke extraction and ventilation have to meet means that the level of detail given by suppliers can vary greatly – all depending on the stage the project has reached. Consequently, many specifiers and developers are still very much in the dark about the best way to compare different solutions during the early stages of a project.
Competing on price
In the early stages of design, there tends to be very little available information other than perhaps a very general description of how the system would work. At tender phase, while a full
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