Heritage Considerations in Fire Safety Engineering

The objective is to initiate a framework of guidance for fire safety engineering and heritage conservation, where there is a dearth between the disciplines. The human factor of emergency egress is evaluated through the pedestrian modelling of a case study heritage cultural center that underwent many interventions. Their effectiveness on egress is evaluated and found to have a 17.7% improvement on total egress time. The residual properties of heritage timber and masonry after fire are also evaluated. The timber testing considers the effect of existing radial cracks on charring of timber through pool fire exposure and cone calorimetry. The radial cracks were found to increase char depth by 64% and 29% for both tests respectively. The masonry testing compares compressive strengths of heritage and contemporary masonry units after 800C furnace heating. Provisional results show no significant reduction in strength and a framework for testing heritage masonry materials is presented.