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Understanding passive fire protection

Thursday 23 February 2023

Ensuring an effective level of fire safety provision is essential on all projects, helping to safeguard life and contents, and ensure your work is fully compliant with building regulations, writes Andrew Yoong, head of technical, Kingspan Technical Insulation GB & Ireland.

Fire safety solutions typically fall into one of two groups – active or passive fire protection. Active fire solutions act to either detect, extinguish or aid in escaping a fire whilst passive fire solutions form part of the building structure and helps contain the fire.

Active and passive fire protection solutions play important and complementary roles as part of a building fire strategy, and it is important to understand where and why these should be specified to ensure proper provision.

Kingspan Safire Coated Batt is used for sealing around multiservice penetrations such as mechanical and electrical services. This passive fire solution provides excellent fire resistance for up to four hours in some applications.

What is passive fire protection?

Passive fire protection helps to maintain building compartmentation in the event of a fire, either fully containing or slowing the spread of smoke and flame. This can allow more time for occupants to evacuate, provides safer access routes for emergency services, and can help to minimise asset damage before a fire is put out.

Passive fire protection products do not require power to function. These include:

Coated batts;
Ventilated cavity barriers;
Sealants; and
Mastics for fire protection in walls and floors.

Depending on the product and application, these solutions may perform in different ways. For example, Kingspan Safire Firescreen Sealant and Kingspan Safire Pressure Exerting Graphite Mastic are both mastics for fire stopping but have different applications.

Safire Pressure Exerting Graphite Mastic will intumesce to close a gap left when combustible pipes melt whereas the Safire Firescreen Sealant does not expand and is used to seal mainly around non-combustible service penetrations and linear gap seals.

What is active fire protection?

Active fire protection aims to detect, extinguish and aid in escaping a fire. Active solutions include:

Smoke and fire alarms;
Water sprinklers;
Escape lighting.

All of these require an action for the product to begin to work. This can be manual or automatic (e.g automatic sprinklers or manually setting off a fire extinguisher). They also typically require power to function.