Scenario Based Assessment of Smoke Detector Reliability to Mitigate the Associated Risk

Abstract

Fire protection system is required for every building in operation, not only for fire extinguishment, but also as a means for saving loss of life and damage of property. Reliability and performance of fire protection systems in a building are important considerations as it would provide a higher level of life safety to the occupants. But a lack of information on the effectiveness of fire safety systems including Smoke Detector System, has been noted as being a limiting factor in the development of performance – based fire safety system designs. Of the fire safety systems, available, Smoke Detector Systems operation have been studied extensively. In this paper, reliability of Smoke Detector based on different fire scenario is studied. In the process initially various research papers have been studied to find the issues which affect the reliability of smoke detectors. Based on the literature review and the identified issues an event tree is developed which is used to develop the fire scenarios for the primary and secondary case studies. The identified issues are also validated in the primary case studies. The most frequent issue is then identified through the primary and secondary case studies, and the risk mitigation measure is provided for those issues, implementation of which can increase the reliability of Smoke Detector and decrease the Required safe Egress Time (RSET) of the occupants thereby allowing them to reach to the Safety Margin before the extensive growth of fire and eventually the loss of life will be minimized. This study focuses on assessing the reliability of smoke detector based on different fire scenarios to mitigate the associated risk.