Introducing a game-changing approach to fire stopping of service penetrations with Laing O’Rourke and BDP

Fire stopping of service penetrations involves installing fire-resistant materials around pipes, ducts, cables, or other services that pass-through fire-rated walls and floors. This limits the spread of fire and smoke, prevents heat from reaching critical components, and helps maintain building structure stability in the event of a fire. Therefore, ensuring that the fire-stopping of service penetrations has been designed correctly is crucial.

Currently, users have to manually check every service penetration one by one. The time taken is directly proportional to the number of penetrations that require fire stopping on a project and is prone to human errors.

To help the industry address this issue, Solibri is introducing a set of fire stopping checks designed to efficiently identify where services breach fire compartmentation walls and floors. 

The Fire Stopping of Service Penetrations Checks Extension allows a detailed examination of the service requirements in relation to the fire-stopping material, which helps maintain the fire rating of the compartmentation walls and floors.

The checks were developed in collaboration with Laing O'Rourke and BDP during the design and construction of Everton FC’s New Stadium. They allow industry professionals to save time on manual work, avoid human errors when the price of a mistake may cost human lives, and ensure information transparency and accountability. We believe that they have the potential to revolutionize the checking process for fire stopping and make a real difference in people's lives.

The benefits of having a more efficient fire stopping validation process will cascade to all project stakeholders:

• Clients have proof that the building has been designed and constructed according to the necessary building standards. They will have data related to this as a part of the Golden Thread and can continue to provide updates to this data when any alteration or modification occurs within the building.
• Contractors can produce the necessary documentation to show that fire safety has been designed correctly. This documentation can be used to check whether the sub-contractors are installing the components correctly (as per manufacturers' requirements).
• Occupants can be assured that fire safety measures have been properly designed and installed in their building.

Part of the revolutionary fire safety design process

The Fire Stopping of Service Penetrations Checks have been developed as part of a larger initiative by Laing O’Rourke and BDP to revolutionize the industry’s approach to fire safety.

Laing O’Rourke, BDP, and Solibri collaborated on Everton FC’s New Stadium project to identify a solution that resulted in a new fire safety design process that improves fire-stopping certainty, creates a resource-efficient approach, and provides accurate and user-friendly fire safety information in line with the Golden Thread.

The new solution enabled Laing O’Rourke to automatically validate over 15,000 penetration seals, providing the client with safety certainty without needing to increase personnel or conduct costly engineering judgments for bespoke details.

According to Laing O’Rourke, this solution is a huge improvement on previous practices, primarily because of the complete level of validation the new fire safety design process enables. On previous projects, responsible parties could only validate approximately 10% of penetration seals, whereas, on Everton FC’s New Stadium project, 100% were validated.

Estefania Alves, Lead Digital Engineer at Laing O’Rouke, says:

“As we continue to validate and confirm compliance with the manufacturer’s specifications, Solibri’s software allowed us to validate, check and confirm the design compliance in the native BIM model. Continuously capturing this information helped us to create a ‘golden thread’ of information that contains design decisions, performance requirements, and validation for every sealed penetration.”

Start using the Fire Stopping of Service Penetrations Checks now!

The new checks are available free of charge for Solibri Office customers with a valid maintenance agreement, starting from version 9.13.2 or later. The checks come as part of the BIM Coordination + extension. You can find more information on how to install the extension and use the new fire stopping checks in this guide.