Fire safety in heritage buildings

Abstract

Besides general principles of fire safety, the aim of this thesis was to guide those responsible to choose the appropriate active intervention methods, more precisely fire detection and automatic suppression systems. In the process, the focus was always on heritage buildings and the values these convey. The suitability of each system for different types of heritage buildings was first evaluated quite generally and should later on be analysed more precisely in the context of a case study on a concrete example. The first part consisted mainly of bibliographical research to assemble a considerable amount of information to cover the more theoretical aspect of this thesis. The practical part of the case study could unfortunately not be done due to the current very exceptional circumstances in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it would have required on-site visitation. Instead, other aspects of fire safety were included in the work, such as the principle of risk management and the associated fire risk analysis. Nevertheless, this thesis remains rather a conceptional one due to the absence of the case study. I came to the conclusion that many methods exist to increase fire safety. However, one has to way up the pros and cons for each one in order to determine which is the most appropriate. Since heritage buildings are particularly sensitive to any kind of intervention, this selection is a complex process, but should be facilitated thanks to this work.