RISK Analysis of the Propagation of Fire IN A Research Laboratory

Security today is a priority for industry due to the accidents of the past, however, it is now time for security and specially for risk analysis not to be limited to big industrial installations such as the chemical and nuclear, but to reach every place in which risk must be interacted with on a daily basis, and that represents considerable consequences to the human and financial capital. That is the reason for this project to overtake the task of doing a risk analysis due to the propagation of fire in a research laboratory, which in this case is a chemical engineering laboratory in which several academic and research tasks of great value take place, and because of this, there is a considerable quantity of valuable personal for the institution. This task carries certain difficulties since in the research laboratories ?opposed to the situation in the in-dustry- the flexibility aspect is present in the distributions of equipment and reactive materials, and may change from a day to another, especially in an educational institution laboratory, in which there's not only professional and trained personnel, but also students with less knowledge about the facility protocols, reason why the risk analysis in this study is carried out around the worst case scenario. To develop this project two fire simulators of public distribution were used, thanks to the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States (NIST). The simulators are CFAST and FDS, and the results were integrated with the development of a computational tool based on a zone model in Excel, a product of Microsoft Office that allows easy manipulation and representation of data, and Visual Basic programming language. This tool is known as FireLab V1, and allows the simulation of any scenario that implies a box type facility using a succession of dialog windows that establish a friendly environment for the user, who is guided step by step and is able to quickly and easily define the problem in a few steps, to finally present the results in a graphic form by manipulating objects trough Visual Basic code, allowing the user a direct understanding of the numeric results previously calculated. FireLab also allows the user to manipulate its basis since the code that makes it functional is open and of easy understanding, which represents an advantage for all of those users wanting to take the tool to other levels, or to modify it so it works for an specific necessity. Thanks to the comparison between the results of the two simulators previously validated and the ones from the developed tool, not only it was found that the functioning of FireLab is the expected, but valuable and coherent information has been obtained from it, allowing the realization of an analysis of the possible consequences in case of fire and in doing so, giving enough information to make both preventive and corrective decisions that minimize the damage to the installation and the personnel who frequent it and its surrounds, that reaches five thousand people per day. The risk analysis realized from the results obtained, consists on the analysis of the damage done to the exterior shells, liquid crystal screens, electronic and mechanical components of the equipments and to the structure of the facility, such as glasses, ventilation systems and evacuation doors among others. This initiative can be seen as unique in the security and risk prevention field due to the possibility of approaching fire behavior in a large variety of compartments and installations of considerable interest that have not been explored yet, allowing Colombia and South America in general to advance in the development of both theory and practice of security since this new tools and studies pretend to open a new door both to the public and private sector in order to change the perception in the developing countries of security as a sophisticated, distant and specially expensive aspect into an integral element in the development of any project that involves human and financial capital that might be compromised due to unintended events such as fire. On the other hand this study is just a gateway and a first step in a series of posterior research and development that pretend to generate economic and efficient tools to carry out risk analysis and simulations of particular interest.