Eric, The Fire Protection Research Foundation is currently working on a project to develop fire sprinkler design criteria for compact mobile storage units. A first report summarizing prior fire testing is available on the NFPA web site. Additional fire testing is planned to happen over the next year but is limited to tightly packed file storage like you'd see in a doctor's office.
The easy answer to your question is that this is an active area of research and there is no published sprinkler criteria that I know of at this time. A handful of historical fire tests are covered in the Research Foundation report, but they deal with archival record storage almost exclusively and provide little help in developing criteria for other configurations such as yours. During the 2007 cycle, the NFPA 13 technical committee attempted to develop criteria for the standard (see the ROP/ROC), but this was voted down on the floor at the annual meeting. Now for the whole story - here are the challenges you face: * This configuration can't simply be treated as shelf, rack or narrow aisle storage following the criteria in NFPA 13 - it won't work. * These fires can burn or smolder for a very long time due to limited oxygen reaching the center of the array. Tests conducted in the last few months resulted in over 60+ minutes for the sprinklers to activate after ignition, with another 60+ minutes of water flow before the fire stopped spreading due to shielding. * When the shelves are closed, it is very difficult for water to penetrate into the storage array, thus allowing the fire to spread in multiple directions. Simply dumping more water on the fire didn't help - some tests conducted up in the 0.7 gpm/ft2 range still didn't touch the fire. * Any fire will result in a significant loss to the entire array including most items consumed by fire, or with heavy smoke/water damage. It will be important to tell the client that the fire protection may save the building, but will not be controlling the fire with the first few sprinklers open. Basically everything stored in the array will be lost... * Your configuration is unique with excess ceiling clearance, further delaying sprinkler activation. The array size is also a concern and if located in a larger space may open a significant number of sprinklers. Remember what Joe has said here many times before - there are just some storage configurations that are not addressed by NFPA 13 and can't be protected with sprinklers only. At this time, if the client is really interested in limited damage to what is stored in the array, it might be best to lower the ceiling, build an enclosure around it, and use a clean agent gaseous fire suppression agent (backed up by sprinklers, of course). Rich Pehrson Futrell Fire Consult & Design -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eric Shelton Sent: Friday, July 27, 2007 3:53 PM To: [email protected] Subject: High Density Art Storage I have a museum with a system of high density storage units used for storing small paintings and sculptures, some of which is crated. It is similar to the units used for records storage, being about 8'6" high with 24" deep shelves, with two back-to-back shelves per unit. The units are manual; there are no motors. The footprint of the units is about 2000 square feet, and the ceiling height is about 30 feet. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of storage, and could suggest a density? Eric J. Shelton, PE Senior Fire Protection Engineer Hankins and Anderson Consulting Engineers 4880 Sadler Road Suite 300 Glen Allen, VA 23060 v: (804) 285.4171 f: (804) 217.8520 http://www.haengineers.com <http://www.haengineers.com/> _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.firesprinkler.org/mailman/listinfo/sprinklerforum To Unsubscribe, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Put the word unsubscribe in the subject field) _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.firesprinkler.org/mailman/listinfo/sprinklerforum To Unsubscribe, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Put the word unsubscribe in the subject field)
