William Gates Building, a Computer Science University building for Cambridge University, is an existing 3-storey assembly building, where students can work on project, follow lectures and lunch in the canteen. Affinity were approached to provide clarity and a retrospective fire strategy for this existing building, after a number of changes took place over the years, including the removal of automatically opening courtyards doors that were part of the the ventilation provision to the main entrance hall.
Upon inspection of the fire safety elements, the impressive entrance hall was found to be a large open area with walkways, which previously were equipped with the automatically opening courtyard doors. The entrance hall would require a fire engineered assessment to justify the reduced ventilation provision.
As a solution to the concerns of the university, the entrance hall was modelled and analysed using smoke modelling. This smoke modelling analysis showed that the current ventilation provision would satisfy all the relevant regulation requirements under conservative conditions. All other aspects to the fire strategy document were coordinated with the client and were well-documented into a single fire strategy report and we were able to ensure all of the essential fire strategy information was available for ease of reference by the client.
