Fire safe­ty con­cepts

IFAB pro­vides fire safe­ty con­cepts for rolling stock that show how fire safe­ty is real­ized in the giv­en projects and how fire safe­ty mea­sures are imple­ment­ed. Depen­dent on leg­isla­tive require­ments, Euro­pean reg­u­la­tions for rolling stock such as TSI LOC&PAS, EN 45545, EN 50553 or oth­er leg­is­la­tions like NFPA 130 or nation­al noti­fied tech­ni­cal rules (NNTR’s) can be applied with­in the fire safe­ty con­cept. Accord­ing to the type of vehi­cle and its intend­ed pur­pose (incl. infra­struc­ture con­sid­er­a­tions) it is deter­mined, which fire safe­ty mea­sures are applied to gain a most effec­tive and cost opti­mized con­cept. The fol­low­ing mea­sures can be applied to devel­op a client spe­cif­ic fire safe­ty con­cept:

 • pre­ven­tive fire safe­ty mea­sures,
 • fire con­tain­ment or fire spread­ing con­trol mea­sures,
 • mea­sures for fire elim­i­na­tion.

IFAB sup­ports to find the right mea­sure­ments and helps to real­ize required actions. In case approval of the effi­cien­cy of an auto­mat­ic fire detec­tion and fire extin­guish­ing sys­tem is required by con­cept, IFAB as an accred­it­ed test lab can sup­port regard­ing mea­sures like, smoke tests, fire test or/and CFD-Sim­u­la­tions. IFAB can also define require­ments for such sys­tems with­in the fire safe­ty con­cept. IFAB gained numer­ous expe­ri­ences in the exer­cise of engi­neer­ing meth­ods as a proof.
A holis­tic fire safe­ty con­cept also includes evac­u­a­tion aspects, fire risk analy­sis, run­ning capa­bil­i­ty analy­sis and var­i­ous oth­er aspects. The objec­tive for fire safe­ty con­cepts is to have a com­pre­hen­sive solu­tion that pro­vides the best tech­ni­cal val­ue for the clients.
IFAB´s aim is to achieve the required lev­el of safe­ty with rea­son­able costs and mod­er­ate impact on vehi­cle design.

Fire risk analy­sis

Fire risk com­pris­es the prob­a­bil­i­ty of fire and its expect­ed dam­age to life, busi­ness or prop­er­ty. Fire risk analy­sis is the start­ing point for effec­tive fire safe­ty designs and fire safe­ty con­cepts for rolling stock, and it can include dif­fer­ent meth­ods such as semi-quan­ti­ta­tive index meth­ods, quan­ti­ta­tive event tree analy­sis, and quan­ti­ta­tive sys­tem reli­a­bil­i­ty analy­sis. The risks and espe­cial­ly the dif­fer­ent lev­els of con­se­quence are defined in close coop­er­a­tion with the client.

Evac­u­a­tion con­cepts

IFAB analy­ses evac­u­a­tion sce­nar­ios for rolling stock accord­ing to giv­en stan­dard val­ues, e.g. accord­ing to TSI LOC&PAS, or in con­junc­tion with the over­all con­cept. Tools used can con­sist of CFD-Sim­u­la­tions, cal­cu­la­tions accord­ing to NFPA130 or cal­cu­la­tions accord­ing to Predtetschen­s­ki and Milin­s­ki.

Run­ning capa­bil­i­ty con­cepts

Run­ning capa­bil­i­ty con­cepts in case of fire on board of rolling stock includ­ing con­sid­er­a­tions by hav­ing crit­i­cal infra­struc­tures and worse evac­u­a­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties built an essen­tial part of holis­tic fire safe­ty con­cepts. In order to real­ize such con­cepts, IFAB uses method­olo­gies giv­en in EN 50553.