Fire General Research Methods

A high proportion of fatal fires occur at night during sleeping hours. That’s why in a fire situation, alarm signals must be effective and wake people from sleep. Studying effectiveness of alarm signals is important in order to save lives. Indeed, effective alarm cues allow people to evacuate quickly before the arrival of fire fighters. If the fire alarm is maladaptive, people aren’t warned and they continue to sleep. And unfortunately, in many cases, fire smokes will asphyxiate these people.

In this study, we will try to know what are the more effective cues to wake people from sleep. Which is the best one: auditory, tactile or light signals? Is it the same for all the categories of people? Thanks to data from previous studies, and thanks to experiments, we will try to accumulate a good knowledge on this topic for after adapt measures to be sure that fire alarms are effective and adapted to wake people from sleep in a fire situation.

So, in a first time, we will describe the different research methods. We will see the strengths and the weakness of each of them. In a second time we will focus on the chosen article. The research study is titled “The use of auditory, tactile and visual alarm signals: a focus on the effectiveness of light”. It was written by Michelle Ball, Dorothy Bruck and Ian Thomas at the Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. We will see which research methods are used in this article, what are the results, what are the good points and the disadvantages of the method and finally what could be the improvements. In a last time, we will discuss on the usefulness of the research findings in fire and safety engineering design.

II. General research methods

1. Laboratories experiments

Laboratories experiments are used to simulate fires and control different parameters (1), where different factors can be varied like the level of smoke, the kind of fire, or the amount of fuel. In fact, thanks to laboratories experiments we can create fire scenarios very close to realistic situations.

Strengths of this method:

• This method permits to have the most accurate results: most of the parameters are controlled and conditions are defined precisely.

• The control of the different parameters and variables greatly reduces the probability of making mistakes in the results. We can repeat the experiments in order to increase the accuracy of results.

• Possibility to reproduce realistic situations and by consequent understand what happened in real fires.

Weaknesses of this method:

• We can create many scenarios but create two perfectly similar fire is impossible. Fire in laboratory it is not the reality, and we