WHAT IS "FRAME"?

"FRAME" means Fire Risk Assessment Method for Engineering and is probably the MOST COMPREHENSIVE, TRANSPARENT and PRACTICAL calculation method for fire risks in buildings. It is a tool to help a fire protection engineer to define a sufficient and cost effective fire safety concept for new or existing buildings. Unlike building codes that are mostly meant to assure a safe escape or rescue for the occupants, "FRAME" also aims at protecting the building, its content and the activities in it. This method can easily be used to evaluate fire risks in existing situations, and to find out whether alternative designs have also comparable efficiencies.

The "FRAME" method calculates the fire risk in buildings for the property and the content, for the occupants and for the activities in it. A systematic evaluation of all major influence factors is given, and the final result is a set of values which express in numbers, what otherwise has to be said by a long description of positive and negative aspects. The method is not suitable for open-air installations.

"FRAME" differs in some way from the approach of building codes. The method is conceived in such a way that the designer looks first for an adequate protection for the property before verifying life safety. In this way, he will check if additional protection is required for the occupants of an already well protected building. Codes and regulations limit often the theoretical possible choices to those construction methods that have built-in safety. Fire proofing for low hazard buildings can therefore be preferred to sprinklers, and is in most cases less expensive. However, "FRAME" make the balance between risk factors and protection in the same way as it is done in most fire codes.

"FRAME" uses elementary fire models and is built like most risk evaluation tools Starting from a limited number of fire scenarios, consideration is given to the probability of fire, to the severity of the consequences and to the level of exposure. After almost thirty years of application of the method (and its predecessors), the author has hundreds of practical calculations to illustrate the use and effectiveness of this method.

USES FOR "FRAME"

• designing the fire protection concept for a particular building,

• checking existing situations to evaluate the level of risk before any attempt to design improvements.

• Loss potential estimates : Experience has shown that there is a relationship between the calculated Risk R and the amount of damage that can be expected after a serious fire situation.

• Trade-offs for building code requirements: A first calculation shall be made for the building according to the rules to define the required level of protection, and a second calculation with the proposed trade-off will find out if the same or a lower risk level is obtained.

• Quality control for the fire protection engineer :as the method requires a systematic review of most of the influence factors of a fire risk, it obliges the engineer to think in a professional way and it helps him to reduce the influence of subjective appreciation.

SOFTWARE FRAME 2008