Active Fire Protection of High-Rise Buildings

In continuation of the series of publications on integrated approaches to fire safety of high-rise buildings we decided to dwell upon the issue of active fire protection in a special category of spaces, where it is undesirable or unacceptable to use the traditional fire extinguishing agents based on water or powder. Such areas primarily include server rooms, LAN closets and other engineering utility premises with electronic or electrical equipment located on floors of highrise buildings.

With the rapid development of information technologies, the number of such areas in administration, shopping or commercial buildings continuously grows. The computational power and the equipment density inside also increases. A modern business center can have from several dozens to hundreds of server rooms. Very often during the designing of a high-rise building part it is difficult to determine in advance where the future owners or tenants will prefer to locate their server equipment and other electronic systems.

The high equipment density as well as the significant heat emission of the servers and the varying load create a substantial risk of fire as a result of emergency operation (in case of violations in power or cooling systems, or defects of indoors equipments) and of the traditional sources of ignition – power cables, lighting fixtures or careless handling of fire.

Importantly, customers treat IT-infrastructural assets as key elements to ensure business continuity, to secure commercial information and maintain business security. However, not all customers are able to professionally assess the risks and the potential damage from a fire in the server room, including the cost of reconstruction, the period of equipment decommissioning and the possible data loss. In these circumstances the designer’s task is to provide the customer with the optimal set of measures to protect server and technical facilities in accordance with the level of importance of the equipment under protection and the safety of the customer’s personnel.

The most effective way of automatic fire suppression in server rooms, LAN closets and other technical facilities with electronic equipment is threedimensional gaseous suppression. This is primarily due to the very mechanism of suppression. When using automatic gaseous suppression, upon the signal from the automatic firefighting equipment there is a required concentration of gas fire extinguishing agent created indoors that is sufficient to completely put the fire out. Unlike powder, water or sprays extinguishing gas does not mechanically affect electronic equipment and does not trigger the hazard of short circuit. Thus, fire extinguishing can be performed without killing the power of the operating equipment.

The second important advantage of gaseous fire suppression is its efficiency over the entire area of the space under protection, including inner perforated cabinets, false ceilings and floors, cable conduits and other less accessible areas. Therefore, using gas one can achieve three-dimensional fire extinguishing instead of simple fire isolation. Besides one does not need further equipment clean-out from the remnants of the fire extinguishing agent (as, for example, opposed to powder), or restoring measures. Once the fire is put out, the extinguishing agent is removed through the ventilation and smokeremoval system.

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