Comparative evaluation method for fire safety design of large storage spaces

The design philosophy “the safety level of a performance-based designed building should not be lower than that of a prescriptive” with objectives of property protection and life safety was implemented in this paper. Three countervailing solutions were adopted to reduce fire risk in the 11664 m 2 case storage. Besides, a virtual prescriptive storage with identical length-width ratio and similar ventilation conditions as the performance-based was designed for comparison. After designing the fire development event tree and simulating six fire scenarios using FDS, the two objectives were achieved as fire severity and risk of property loss of the performance-based design storage were found to be no higher than those of the prescriptive design and ASETs were greater than RSETs for all fire scenarios.