A Study on Securing Safety for High Rise Building Fire-Focused on Applying Escapable Fire Evacuation System

Under the Korean Enforcement Decree of the Building Act, all of high story apartment houses more than 5 story buildings are mandate to install fire evacuation system to ensure safe evacuation from fire accident providing quick and easy bi-directional escape route when main entrance is blocked by flame and toxic smoke caused from fire. However, current fire evacuation system shows lack of understanding from residents and thus widely ignored for having insufficient safety functions especially on fire emergency. Studies found that recent changes in housing characteristics through improvement of living has lead applying various planes into dense and multipurpose floor space for convenient residence trend while conventional passive fire evacuation system such as indoor shelter space, light-weight partition and top-down emergency exit are still installed without improvement on fire safety which may cause unsuccessful evacuation especially when residential buildings are raising high. An alternative high rise building evacuation method, so the called escapable fire evacuation system has analyzed for safety evaluation compared with conventional passive stay able fire escape system that can bring efficient and safer solution providing high rise residents escape from fire accident. Evaluation for safety evacuation on active fire escape system has performed by Fire Dynamics Simulation and applying Pathfinder simulation, resulted in providing proper and appropriate escape route within the safety escape time allowed for multiple residents including disabled and elderly persons in high rise building fire.