Effects of Fire Barriers on Building Fire Risk - A Case Study Using CUrisk

CUrisk as a comprehensive fire risk analysis model have been under active development over the past decade. Recently a Barrier Failure submodel and a Fire Spread submodel have been integrated into the CUrisk system structure. CUrisk can provide data of barrier failure followed by results of fire spread through the Fire Spread submodel. This paper presented a fire risk analysis case study of a six-storey apartment building of light-frame construction, aimed at showing the performance of CUrisk and particularly the effect of wall barriers on building fire risk. The apartment building has 18 different designs of wall barriers, all of which are light frame assemblies but with different configurations. These wall barriers have different failure times under the unsuppressed fires in the apartment of fire origin, and consequently resulted in different times of fire spread to the adjacent compartments. The maps of fire spread in the unsuppressed fires at 60 minutes demonstrated good patterns and the important role of fire barriers in containing a fire. The impact of wall barrier designs on occupant risk is also discussed. Results showed that the building designed with better fire-resistive barriers could lead to lower occupant deaths, which are presented quantitatively.