Fire Safety Of Historical Buildings

This book applies a behavioral point of view to individuals’ fire safety in historic buildings. It outlines theoretical and operative issues, based on recent studies and international guidelines. Firstly, critical issues for Building Heritage fire safety are widely discussed, by including the modelling of human factor and man-environment-fire interference in these architectural spaces. A significant part of the book includes a discussion on emergency modeling and simulation. A source code for representing the fire evacuation process (including man-evacuation facilities interactions) is offered to the reader. Methods for effectiveness assessment of risk-reducing solutions are provided and tested in a case-study. Being a structured approach to occupants-related problems during a fire in heritage buildings, it offers an innovative methodology and practical examples that researchers and designers can use as a guide when proposing and testing solutions. Evaluation indexes for effectiveness assessment (also useful for future guidelines or handbooks) are included. Readers are encouraged to understand these indexes within the proposed approach, so as to extend their applications and possibilities of how to introduce human behaviors-based solutions in other fields. Lastly, attention is focused on the proposal and evaluation of low-impact and not-invasive strategies, such as ones based on wayfinding elements. From this point of view, the pros and cons of wayfinding systems are discussed: these are important today, especially for fire-safety designers, because of the ongoing innovations in this field.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions (SAHC) that was held in Cusco, Peru in 2018. It disseminates recent advances in the areas related to the structural analysis of historical and archaeological constructions. The challenges faced in this field show that accuracy and robustness of results rely heavily on an interdisciplinary approach, where different areas of expertise from managers, practitioners, and scientists work together. Bearing this in mind, SAHC 2018 stimulated discussion on the new knowledge developed in the different disciplines involved in analysis, conservation, retrofit, and management of existing constructions. This book is organized according to the following topics: assessment and intervention of archaeological heritage, history of construction and building technology, advances in inspection and NDT, innovations in field and laboratory testing applied to historical construction and heritage, new technologies and techniques, risk and vulnerability assessments of heritage for multiple types of hazards, repair, strengthening, and retrofit of historical structures, numerical modeling and structural analysis, structural health monitoring, durability and sustainability, management and conservation strategies for heritage structures, and interdisciplinary projects and case studies. This volume holds particular interest for all the community interested in the challenging task of preserving existing constructions, enable great opportunities, and also uncover new challenges in the field of structural analysis of historical and archeological constructions.

This Guide provides information on special topics that affect the fire safety performance of very tall buildings, their occupants and first responders during a fire. This Guide addresses these topics as part of the overall building design process using performance-based fire protection engineering concepts as described in the SFPE Engineering Guide to Performance Based Fire Protection. This Guide is not intended to be a recommended practice or a document that is suitable for adoption as a code. The Guide pertains to “super tall,” “very tall” and “tall” buildings. Throughout this Guide, all such buildings are called “very tall buildings.” These buildings are characterized by heights that impose fire protection challenges; they require special attention beyond the protection features typically provided by traditional fire protection methods. This Guide does not establish a definition of buildings that fall within the scope of this document.