Performance-based Fire Design of Air-supported Membrane Coal Storage Shed

The air-supported membrane shed is a new type of building structure for storing coal. Performance-based fire design for these sheds is needed because they meet the requirement of fire compartment and safe evacuation distance stipulated by current fire protection design specification difficultly, and has danger of structural collapse in fire, due to their uniqueness in building volume and membrane material. A domestic raw coal storage shed taking advantage of air-supported membrane structure was taken for example: 1.Field simulation software FDS was used to verify the effectiveness of evacuation corridors as fire barrier. 2. In the most unfavorable fire scenes, the dangerous coming time of carbon monoxide, temperature and flue gas visibility at the clear height, i.e. available safe evacuation time was simulated in FDS, and the required safe evacuation time was calculated by Pathfinder software. The structural instability time of the air- supported membrane coal storage shed was get by combustion characteristic experiment of the membrane material and numerical simulation finally. 3. Reliability of the fire protection design was determined by comparing the three times mentioned above. The results show that, both the available safe evacuation time and the structural instability time are longer than the required safe evacuation time, so the existing fire design in the air-supported membrane coal storage shed can ensure the personnel safety evacuation. But the collapse risk still exist in fire scenes, therefore, the minimum distance between coal pile and membrane structure should be controlled properly in engineering applications.