The development of automatic fire protection methods for computing and telecommunications areas
type: CreativeWork
description: With highly accelerated developments in computing and communications technology, society's overall dependence on this equipment is becoming increasingly acute. In areas such as critical electronic data processing centres and telecommunication hubs, one of the main protection objectives is to achieve minimum operational disruption, as downtime resulting from a fire condition could lead to huge financial losses. Minimising negative impact on an organization and the need for a sound basis in the decision making process are the fundamental reasons why companies implement fire risk management for their essential information technology systems. For many years a key element used to protect these critical assets was the installation of a fixed Halon 1301 gas extinguishing system. Often, the mere presence of a computer was sufficient justification to install such a system and little thought was given to any systematic fire risk assessment of the installation. This led to the use of Halon 1301 where other fire extinguishing systems and protection techniques could have been applied with equal effectiveness and at comparable costs. The cessation of production of halon as a result of the Montreal Protocol gave fresh impetus to the development of suitable alternative fire extinguishing agents. It also offered fire protection engineers an opportunity to re-evaluate existing loss control techniques and to examine alternative fire protection strategies. However, it is argued in this study, that an appropriate level of automatic fire protection can only be determined by the use of a suitable quantitative risk assessment and a number of such methodologies are critically examined. There are a significant number of contributing factors that must be considered when deciding which fire suppression system to select for a new installation or whether to retrofit fire suppression on a legacy platform. Consequently, it is necessary to develop a methodology to quantify any fire suppression tech…
abstract: With highly accelerated developments in computing and communications technology, society's overall dependence on this equipment is becoming increasingly acute. In areas such as critical electronic data processing centres and telecommunication hubs, one of the main protection objectives is to achieve minimum operational disruption, as downtime resulting from a fire condition could lead to huge financial losses. Minimising negative impact on an organization and the need for a sound basis in the decision making process are the fundamental reasons why companies implement fire risk management for their essential information technology systems. For many years a key element used to protect these critical assets was the installation of a fixed Halon 1301 gas extinguishing system. Often, the mere presence of a computer was sufficient justification to install such a system and little thought was given to any systematic fire risk assessment of the installation. This led to the use of Halon 1301 where other fire extinguishing systems and protection techniques could have been applied with equal effectiveness and at comparable costs. The cessation of production of halon as a result of the Montreal Protocol gave fresh impetus to the development of suitable alternative fire extinguishing agents. It also offered fire protection engineers an opportunity to re-evaluate existing loss control techniques and to examine alternative fire protection strategies. However, it is argued in this study, that an appropriate level of automatic fire protection can only be determined by the use of a suitable quantitative risk assessment and a number of such methodologies are critically examined. There are a significant number of contributing factors that must be considered when deciding which fire suppression system to select for a new installation or whether to retrofit fire suppression on a legacy platform. Consequently, it is necessary to develop a methodology to quantify any fire suppression tech…
author: Carter, Paul
language: en
keywords: H121 - Fire safety engineering
date published: 2003-12
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:36:13Z
provider: University of Central Lancashire
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Central Lancashire