Heat and smoke vent

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Heat and Smoke Vents are installed in buildings as active fire protection. They open on a roof intended to vent heat and smoke developed by fire inside the building by the action of buoyancy, so they are known as "gravity vents".

Video Heat and smoke vent

Regulatory requirements

Heat and smoke vents are usually installed in buildings for the following reasons:

• Occupants of storage - The rate of heat release from high-stack storage commodities is expected to be very high. In such a case, it is considered by some fire protection professionals desirable to vent heat from the building if the temperature in the building reaches a high enough level to harm the structural stability of the roof system. Smoke ventilation is also considered to provide small benefits to improve visibility in interior spaces to facilitate manual fire fighting efforts for a limited period of time.

The use of ventilation in sprayed buildings has been a controversy for the last 25 years. The vent technology and sprinkler technology are developed independently of each other. Their interaction as a profitable technology working together has not been proven by success. Many fire protection professionals fear that ventilation can cause the sprinkler system to fail to control the fire.

• Large internal volume space - Ventilation of smoke from large rooms that regularly contain large numbers of people, such as malls and atrium.

Maps Heat and smoke vent

Type

Automatic heat and smoke vents are commercially available in two general categories:

• Mechanical rails, powered by springs, pneumatic actuators, or electric motors.
• Ventilation drop-out - made of plastic that shrinks in the presence of heat (ie, broken panel).

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Interactions with automatic fire sprinklers

Most of the guides available for the design of heat and smoke vents installed in buildings are limited to buildings without an unprotected floor. This is partly a historical consequence of the installation of hot and smoke vents after August 1953 General Motors, Livonia, MI fires at an unattended manufacturing facility that effectively halts the production of automatic transmissions for all GMs. Ventilation is also installed in storage premises prior to installation of fire sprinklers as a widespread practice of warehousing industry. Once the sprinklers are installed in the storage building as a widespread practice, there is a lack of consensus on the nature of the sprinkler interaction and automatic heat and smoke ventilation. This lack of consensus continues to this day.

The automatic heat and smoke vent are required by the model building codes in large, single-storey and shared storage facilities with control mode fire sprays, but are not allowed to be installed in conjunction with the suppression mode, for example, ESFR, fire sprays unless manually operated ventilation or mechanisms operating with a thermal rating of not less than 360 Â ° F. for fear of mastering the sprinkler system and destroying the building.

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See also

• Smoking gas drainage
• Air pressure ductwork
• Overweight channels
• Passive fire protection
• Active fire protection

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References

Source of the article : Wikipedia