Broadening New Zealand Hospital Design Through Modelling - A Case Study

A high level of fire safety is necessary to protect vulnerable patients in hospitals. However, with finite healthcare budgets, efficient fire engineering designs are crucial. Fire compartmentation is a cornerstone of these hospital designs but is particularly expensive in New Zealand where resilient seismic design can require 5 metre slab to slab heights. For a new hospital in New Zealand, the ability of ceiling height walls to contain smoke and fire, while accounting for patient safety, was explored instead. A combination of Zone and CFD modelling was applied to validate this design. Presented with a lack of performance data, such as leakage rates and failure characteristics of non-rated construction, numerous scenarios were analysed as input sensitivities. The scenarios demonstrated the effectiveness of ceiling height walls and the result was a safe and efficient fire engineering design at lower construction cost.