Designing plate girders for the Passive Fire Protection (PFP) requirement is an established regime within FBEAM^® that has been used for many years by our team of engineers to validate your designs for PFP. Fabsec is pleased to announce that this function ‘FIREBEAM^®’ will now be made available to design engineers.

This exciting new development will allow engineers to ensure that their designs are not only structurally adequate but also provide the required structural PFP resistance. The Sherwin Williams intumescent passive fire coatings provide fire resistance up to 2 hours

The introduction of the Government’s new Fire and Building Safety Acts will increase responsibilities and legal obligations that designers and specifiers of buildings will need to be cognisant of, along with the potential impact it may have on their liability. For those valued customers who want to take a proactive step towards meeting these changes, we have broadened the scope of design features available within FBEAM^®. Some of the features and benefits now available are:

• Fabsec beams can be designed for the PFP requirement, giving the engineer certainty that the beam is efficient in both PFP and ambient conditions and allowing the user to specify passive fire protection durations in 15-minute increments up to 120 minutes
• Use of Sherwin Williams’ low VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) FIRETEX Intumescent products
• Range of offsite intumescent products
• Products with excellent impact, abrasion, and weather resistance
• Access to products with supplementary testing to demonstrate explosion resistance
• Built-in optimisation regimes to ensure the specification of the most practical beams
• SCI (Steel Construction Institute) Assessed

The benefits of specifying FIREBEAM^® are clear:

• Removal of hazardous activity and VOCs from the construction site as well as site debris and the need for site clean-up processes
• Use of offsite products avoids the need to encapsulate areas as may often be required for site applied systems
• Application of site applied systems removed from the critical construction path
• Increased safety and quality control in a workshop environment
• Increased operator safety by the removal of working at height
• Improved handover of key areas of the structure
• The potential for construction phase fire failures is greatly reduced
• Fully proven, certificated, fire performance data backed by a third-party peer-review and assessed by the  SCI (Steel Construction Institute)
• Increased design scope outside of the generic RT1356 guidance limitations due to the actual fire testing evidence as well as the structural design analysis built into FIREBEAM^®
• Use of evidenced and authenticated data to allow the use of un-filled deck voids for a trapezoidal metal deck profile including  120-minute passive fire resistance
• Helps reduce the environmental impact by economically designing the steel and paint to reduce mass and volume

Contact sharon@fabsec.co.uk for access to the FIREBEAM^® Fire License