Fire safety solutions allow early detection makes the difference between a minor accident and a significant business shutdown. Fire protection in a building requires two types of protection:
Active Fire Protection
Active Fire Protection (AFP) plays a curative role and represents all fire detection and extinguishing systems (detectors, sprinklers, extinguishers, etc.). Therefore it is intended to warn users of fire and act on it through automatic or human intervention.
Passive Fire Protection
Passive fire protection (PFP) plays a preventive role. It represents all the constructive measures that allow a structure to resist fire for a given time (fixed by the standards relating to the type of building).
These constructive measures are intended to:
- Stop the progression of smoke.
- Prevent the spread of flames.
- Contain the thermal effects in the disaster area.
- Maintain the fire stability of the structural elements.
All these fire safety solutions are called passive because they work without human intervention or external energy input. Their objective is to allow the evacuation of people and the intervention of emergency services, confining the fire as long as possible in the only space where it is declared.
Detection systems in industrial installations can face challenging environments such as heat, dust, cold, or explosions.
The maxim in these cases is to protect storage areas that may cause combustion (plastics, cardboard, etc.) and ensure that building activities can be resumed in the shortest possible time.To deal with these situations, solutions such as low expansion foam – which offers an expansion ratio of 5:1 – are among the most suitable for protecting storage tanks or processing areas. On the other hand, high expansion foam – with an expansion rate of 500:1 – would be more ideal for covering larger volume hazardous facilities, such as explosive liquid storage facilities, conveyors, etc.
In facilities such as shopping malls, offices, and hotels, one of the main problems is the evacuation of many people in case of emergency. In such cases, it is necessary to have several evacuation strategies, including various evacuation routes and trained personnel capable of dealing with such situations. And finally, appropriate extinguishing solutions. Automatic sprinklers are systems capable of automatically detecting a fire, transmitting an alarm, and controlling the fire.
Automatic sprinklers are activated by temperature and cool the environment, reducing smoke and cooling the structure not to collapse. Whether in a factory or a store, dealing with a fire situation would be unfeasible without unified management of the security resources that make it up.
Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) unifies multiple security systems, connecting and correlating vital information in a centralized and integrated way.
By implementing a PSIM solution, organizations can turn individual systems’ data storage into real-time actionable intelligence to increase productivity, efficiency, and enterprise security. These management systems are linked to turnkey approaches to fire protection. Thus, they offer fire safety solutions that integrate from the design phase, complete system supply and installation, commissioning, and testing to deliver to the customer fully ready for operation.
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