Broadening New Zealand Hospital Design Through Modelling - A Case Study

Spencer Johnstone - Beca - FEMTC 2024
https://www.femtc.com/events/2024/d2-...

A high level of fire safety is necessary to protect vulnerable patients in hospitals.
However, with finite healthcare budgets, efficient fire engineering designs are crucial.
Fire compartmentation is a cornerstone of these hospital designs but is particularly expensive in New Zealand where resilient seismic design can require 5 meter slab to slab heights.
For a new hospital in New Zealand, the ability of ceiling height walls to contain smoke and fire, while accounting for patient safety, was explored instead.
A combination of Zone and CFD modelling was applied to validate this design.
Presented with a lack of performance data, such as leakage rates and failure characteristics of non-rated construction, numerous scenarios were analyzed as input sensitivities.
The scenarios demonstrated the effectiveness of ceiling height walls and the result was a safe and efficient fire engineering design at lower construction cost.

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