Fatal fire risk checking for residential building design

Abstract

Building fire puts great threat on people's lives and causes huge numbers of fatalities each year. In 2007, total fire death in the United States alone was 3,430. The number of fatalities is distributed among residential 75.5%, non-residential 3.6%, vehicle 16.7%, outside 1.6%, and other 2.6%. Although much research has been done on building fire simulation to support designing safer buildings, all simulation systems currently available are focused on major factors in nonresidential buildings such as bottlenecks, arching, pushing, etc. Residential building fires and non-residential fires are very different in many aspects. Therefore simulation systems focused on nonresidential buildings have little effects on residential buildings. In this research, we analysed major factors causing deaths in residential building fires, and filtered out building design related factors. We then developed a system which shows the risk of fatal fire in residential building designs. This system is expected to help architects to easily detect potential risks of fatal fire and design safer residential buildings.