8.1 General

Once the performance criteria have been established, the engineer needs to focus on the development and analysis of design alternatives to meet these criteria. The first part of analyzing design alternatives is the consideration of possible fire scenarios, which are then filtered into selected design fire scenarios. Once design fire scenarios are established, then trial designs can be developed (see Chapter 9) and evaluated (see Chapter 10) to determine whether they meet the performance criteria for every design fire scenario. Figure 8-1 illustrates this process.

Figure 8-1: Identifying, Developing, and Evaluating Fire Scenarios

The process of identifying possible fire scenarios and developing them into design fire scenarios consists of the following steps:

• Consider possible fire scenarios (Section 8.2).

• Define the design fire scenarios, a subset of the possible fire scenarios (Section 8.4).

• Quantify the design fire scenarios.