Breakthrough Sustainable Innovation: The Journey behind the Development of 90 Minute Fire Rated Door

Globally around 6 million people get seriously injured in fire accidents per annum and over 500,000 die. Approximately, 80- 85% of deaths are mainly due to smoke inhalation and not by burns. The smoke kills faster than fire. Studies from recent fire incidents have shown than 57 % of people killed in fires are not even in the room of the fire’s origin. There has also been an increase in the fire incidents in the GCC region where the entire façade had been burnt down. We had to address this problem and decided to engineer a solution which can be sustainable, locally available and easily sourced. The challenges were obvious, Aluminum is conventionally understood as a metal which deforms at about 600 degrees Celsius and the air temperature during a fire can go up to 900 degrees Celsius in a room. However Aluminum has significant properties such as lightweight, recyclable and high strength to weight ratio. These properties cannot be achievable in any other metal. So we had to design a system which had to be innovative and had to maintain the integrity for at least an 60 minutes. In the paper, we would like to show how we had to maintain the integrity of the door in such blazing temperatures of 900 degrees Celsius by designing two special barriers – internal and external. Both needed to be highly insulated in order to prevent the heat and smoke to transfer from inside to outside. The design had to function as an entire system and maintain its integrity for more than one hour under conditions of extreme fire and smoke. Further in the paper, we would like to explain the process we went through in conducting the fire test and the results which had come through as per the British EN Standards. The system eventually passed a fire rating of 90 minutes flawlessly. This is indeed a breakthrough development as now we are able to present aluminum door as a sustainable fire rated material of choice and replace the use of non-sustainable fire rated material such as stainless steel and wood

Keywords:

fire insulation , external barrier , internal barrier , integrity , insulation