Fire safety engineering techniques for innovative materials such as technical textiles and nanocomposites

Use of Fire Safety Engineering (FSE) has increased substantially during the last decades. In the beginning fire safety engineering was mainly used for fire performance based design of buildings but recently new areas such as marine transport have appeared as new applications for fire safety engineering. So on one hand we have the increasing use of FSE. On the other hand we have the introduction of new innovative materials on the market. While techniques for fire engineering are well established for traditional materials and products it is necessary to investigate how these techniques can be used for these newer innovative materials. The paper will be limited mainly to the establishment of the design fire, one of the important steps in a fire performance based design. This article discusses some of the possibilities to use the traditional techniques for new materials, some of the recent developed techniques but also what needed to be considered when using these techniques for new materials and products. Also it is shown that the benefit of FR can be shown by means of FSE. (Less)