Simon Lay to present on natural ventilation and smoke control at Fire Safety Design and Sustainable Buildings symposium

On November 7th and 8th, NFPA and the Fire Protection Research Foundation will host a symposium on fire safety and sustainable building design in Chicago. We thought we would highlight some of the event speakers and their sessions to help you decide if you should attend. First up: Simon Lay, C.Eng, MiFireE,  Director of Fire Engineering at AECOM. 

Simon's presentation is titled, "Natural Ventilation and Smoke Control: What conflicts can arise and how can they be overcome whilst ensuring that the sustainability objectives of natural ventilation are still met?"

The use of natural ventilation in buildings is no longer driven purely by sustainable aspirations. Increasingly, natural ventilation is necessary to meet the requirements of clients, to reduce running costs and in some locations to achieve sustainability standards set by Local or National Government.

Day to day climate control that uses ventilated facades and internal atria with natural ventilation are potential solutions to meet the sustainability goals. However, such solutions rely on generating a vertical distribution of air which goes against the need to prevent the movement of smoke and flames in a fire.

Simon will briefly review what conflicts can arise between natural ventilation in high rise buildings and smoke ventilation and then consider some of the options for solving these conflicts. The advantages and disadvantages of different solutions will be considered with the aim of demonstrating the importance of holistic, performance based design in achieving effective, sustainable solutions that be practicably delivered.

Simon Lay is a former chair of the CTBUH Working party on Fire Safety in High Rise Buildings and a member of the CTBUH Advisory Group. Simon has led the fire safety design on many tall building projects and is the author of many papers and articles on fire engineering and high-rise design. As a strong proponent of performance based design as the best way of ensuring safety through design, Simon is well known and respected for introducing innovation and fighting apathy building design.

Learn more about the symposium and register today! 

Comments

[Ventilation services fan]

I was just thinking about utilizing ventilation services in my new home. I want to make sure that it's better prepared in case of a fire, and that it has less of a chance of growing mold and the like. I had an apartment in college that had a serious problem with mold because the ventilation was so bad (in other words it didn't exist).

[Smoke Extraction]

Now a days, climate change rapidly, temperature jumps up and down which is not good for our health, having a ventilation gives us an advantage to be immune especially air pollution, it also help us to control smoke to prevent fire which is the no. 1 problem every summer.