One of the most vital issues to be addressed by building owners is fire protection. Several facility features can be optional or arbitrarily implemented by facility managers. However, a fire protection program is not. Therefore, it is important that no facility can ever be operational without it as it is a part of the requirements for building regulations compliance.
Fire protection systems are very important to the operations of the facility for a lot of reasons. The foremost is to save lives. Fire protective coatings systems must let the safe escape of people when fire breaks out. Also, a slow spread of fire and it's fast extinguishing preserves the building soundness of the building and saves your assets and the overall infrastructure from expensive damage. In the emergency of fire fighting operations, fire protective systems can prevent any harm to rescuers and firefighters on the job.
How to protect facilities from fire?
A great fire protection program for the facility involves the installation of both active and passive fire protection systems. The prime of active systems is to actively combat fire at its onset and consisting mainly of extinguishers, fire detectors and sprinklers. These systems detect the presence of fire early on, also trigger the evacuation of occupants and alert emergency people immediately. Also, fire suppressors and ventilators can even manage the spread of fire and starve it out of oxygen. On the other hand side,
Passive systems act as a form of second line defense to contain the rapid spread of fire. These protective coating systems attempt to diffuse the fire and protect building structure from collapse.
What are intumescent coatings?
Passive fire protection depends for the most part on the unique ability of intumescent substances to combat fire. This paint increases in volume and decreases in density when exposed to heat and charring as a result. In addition to this, the char becomes a poor heat conductor, denying the fire from spreading further.
A lot of fire protection coatings with intumescent properties contain sodium, hydrates, graphite and silicates elements. The hydrates release water vapor when exposed to heat and inducing a cooling effect and producing the fire retarding char that insulates against fire growth. Several hydrates based low pressure intumescent are used in fire protective coatings that act as a fire proofing due to this endothermic property.
Fire protection coating contractors
Saving people's lives and assets need the expertise of proficient fire protection coatings experts to make the fire protection coatings system work. The experienced Steel structure fireproofing contractors are a very vital part of the facility's safety planning team as they bring in the experience and knowledge for better fire protection. Also, the ability to set up the most superior coating systems that can cut the rate of fire spread is very important when the dreaded event arrives. The best coatings can provide occupants time to flee safely and reduce damage to building structure.
