14 February 2020
The 1st International Conference for the fire protection of structures, attracted a lot of interest and filled up all 450 places of the aula on both days. The focus of the conference was the new Greek Fire Protection Regulation for Buildings, referred to as Presidential Decree 41 (2018). It is a new regulatory approach, which is based on a stricter prescriptive part and alternatively allows a performance based approach.
International and national speakers presented proposals to bridge current gaps to improve the regulatory process and to develop involvement of the building sector.
External insulated facade systems and the need for fire safety engineering expertise were high on the agenda. Dr Diane Daems, on behalf of the Modern Building Alliance, gave an overview for an EU and National regulatory framework based on the B.I.O. framework and the 7 layers of fire safety in buildings.
The EU is working on a harmonized large scale performance based facade fire test and this will take several years of development. However, as an interim approach proven test methods and experience of abroad could be applied. Several examples of tests, fire safety engineering cases and risk based approaches were provided in the papers.
