Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

For architectural and functional reasons, transport terminal buildings are frequently designed to incorporate large uncompartmented spaces. Fire resisting walls as means of limiting fire and smoke spread within these large spaces are therefore absent. This paper shows how fire safety may be achieved nevertheless for the case of a very large airport terminal building to be built in Osaka Bay in Japan. The fire safety strategy relies essentially on two designed features. The first of these is that the areas of high fire load such as shops are limited in extent and well defined. It was proposed therefore that these areas should be protected separately by sprinklers and provided with a dedicated smoke extract on system. This is known as the "cabin concept". Secondly, areas of combustible material, including seating, tend to be well separated with large circulation spaces in between. By considering radiation from a severe fire in each such area, it was shown that fire spread between them was not a problem. This was termed the "island concept". This paper describes the calculations carried out and the results obtained. The design fires adopted, and many of the calculation procedures used were taken from the new Japanese Integrated Design Method for Fire Protection.