Fire protection of any defined space, area, volume, room, or occupancy can present its own design challenges for fire protection system and equipment designers and/or manufacturers. Generally, the designer must consider how the space to be protected, including its physical location, its dimensions, its application or use, and/or the occupants or items within the space, can impact fire protection system design and/or performance. Depending upon the location of the space to be protected, fire protection system designs may be limited or constrained by the availability of electrical power and/or firefighting agents or fluids such as water. Spaces, such as for example, tunnels may be in locations, or have areas therein, in which it is difficult to supply water for firefighting or electricity for system components. Known solutions for installations having limited water may include self-contained, central supplies of firefighting agent or fluid, such as for example a centralized storage tank of water for use in a fixed deluge firefighting systems for road tunnels. Such a limited supply of firefighting fluid can raise other design issues or complexities for sufficient fire protection, such as for example, supply depletion due to application rates of the firefighting fluid and/or duration of system operation. Alternatively, if the protected space is located in an area where water and power are readily available, the space may be in an area where it is undesirable to have a large volume of water discharged or distributed to address a fire due to the potential for costly water damage. Accordingly the objective for the system designer may be to provide fire protection with a minimal amount of water.
The physical dimensions and/or configuration of the occupancy must also be considered in fire protection. For example, designers must consider the length, area, and/or volume over which a firefighting agent or fluid is to be dispersed, distributed or applied. If the space to be protected is relatively small, such as for example the space above a stove or fryer as compared to a storage warehouse, it may not be cost effective to install a complex piping system to deliver firefighting fluid to one or two devices, such as for example, nozzles.
The protected space may present possible obstructions to the firefighting fluid distribution and/or application. For example, storage warehouses or spaces can present challenges for owners, operators, designers and/or installers to provide the appropriate based spray type sprinkler systems for the warehoused items or its occupants from floor to ceiling. In storage warehouses protected by automatic sprinklers located at the ceiling above storage racks and commodities, designers are concerned with the application of water including both its distribution and penetration, to address storage fires with suppression or control, which may initiate at the floor of the occupancy and be obscured by the storage or the storage racks. Water distribution density requirements, system hydraulics, sprinkler spacing, and obstructions due to the commodity itself and/or the racks structures upon which the commodity is stored, can place design or operating constraints on the fire protection system and impact its performance. One known solution to address fire protection of rack storage systems is to employ “in-rack” sprinklers at regular height intervals throughout the storage rack system with water supply lines running along or parallel to the storage racks to provide water to the in-rack sprinklers. However, currently available in-rack sprinklers have their own disadvantages, which include: (1) installation and material costs, (2) loss of rack adjustment flexibility, (3) potential for damage due to freezing water supply pipes, and (4) excess water damage from sprinkler discharge.
Regardless of the type of space being protected, fire protection system designers must consider the application or use of the space and how people or equipment may operate in the space and impact, interfere or modify operation of the system and/or its components overtime. System designers may have to consider the durability and exposure of system components to impact forces during normal operations within the space. For example, warehouses in which forklifts, palletized commodities or other stored items are frequently moved about, designers, installers and maintenance personnel are concerned with minimizing damage to the components of the fire protection system and the fluid supply lines.
Additionally, depending upon the application or use of the protected occupancy, there may be a need to frequently change or expand the fire protection system. Thus, designers need to consider the ease in which a system can be maintained, altered and/or expanded. For example, standard spray type fire protection systems can be difficult to change or expand due to time and materials to alter or expand the fluid supply piping or the need to completely shut down the fire protection system to make the desired changes.
Effective and efficient fire protection can be difficult to achieve due to the shape and size of the materials, items or equipment being protected by the system. For example, one issue in the protection of boats stored dry in racks is that it can be difficult to efficiently apply water in the event of a fire. As an initial matter, the boats can be of varying size so it can be difficult to install protection devices uniformly to suit all storage situations. Moreover, due to the nature of a boat hull, there is the potential for discharged water to accumulate in the hulls of the boats, which can present an added hazard as the collected water can overload the storage racks. Furthermore, for other fire protection hazards, it may be desirable to avoid the discharge of water into the area due to the operative use of the area, such as, data rooms and records storage. Accordingly, for some applications it may be desirable to use a firefighting agent other than water. One known alternative includes the use of hypoxic air to reduce the ability for fires to start and/or continue to burn. The problems with this solution include: (a) the difficulty in maintaining an adequate envelope or sealing over the area of application to prevent the introduction of external oxygen which may reignite a fire; and (b) the health safety risk to workers due to a reduced oxygen environment.