There is a trend in Europe towards increasing the quality and performance of regulations. At the same time, regulatory failure has been observed in the area of building fire safety regulation in England and elsewhere. As a result, an analysis of the appropriateness of fire safety regulations in Spain is warranted, with the objective being to assess whether a suitable level of fire safety is currently being delivered. Three basic elements must be considered in such analysis: the legal and regulatory framework, the level of fire risk/safety of buildings that is expected and the level which actually results, and a suitable method of analysis. The focus of this paper is creating a legal and regulatory framework, in particular with respect to fire safety in buildings. Components of an ¿ideal¿ building regulatory framework to adequately control fire risk are presented, the existing building regulatory framework is summarized, and an analysis of the gaps between the ideal and the existing systems is presented. It is concluded that the gaps between the ideal and the existing framework are significant, and that the current fire safety regulations are not appropriate for assuring delivery of the intended level of fire risk mitigation.

At the present time, there is no nation-wide, systematic approach to collecting, analyzing and presenting fire loss data in Spain. This makes it very difficult to understand the fire problem in general, and more specifically with respect to vulnerable populations, such as the elderly. As first steps to overcome the lack of a nationally populated and managed fire incident database, a methodology for collecting fire data, based on information extracted from the media, was developed. This approach is modeled in part on the Fire Incident Data Organization system from the National Fire Protection Association in the United States, which identifies significant fires through a clipping service, the Internet and other sources. For the initial Spanish database, selected variables were chosen from similar statistics gathered in other countries. The variables are related to the place and moment of the fire, its causes and consequences, the building typology and state, and the fatal and non-fatal victims involved, among other factors. In the initial data set, data concerning residential fires occurred between January 2016 and December 2016 was collected, and variables were analyzed. An initial focus was to identify the risk factors for one of the most vulnerable groups in case of fire, the elderly people. The development of this first-ever nationally-representative database of fire incidents in Spain is overviewed, and analysis of elderly population in dwelling fires is presented as a stu

Dimensioning the stairs in case of fire is amongst the most important features in today architecture design. A bigger complexity of the buildings (mixed uses, crowded spaces, occupants with disabilities, tall structures, etc.) is added to new social habits, and the activities traditionally placed on the lowest parts of the buildings tend to occupy the upper floors. This article shows that the prescriptive calculations for the dimensioning of protected stairs are unable to face this challenge because they are based on simplified models, only valid for conventional buildings and distributions. It analizes the Spanish Technical Building Code, showing its weakness, and introduces the necessary performance-based design concepts to understand the problem. It concludes that any complex design must be addressed studying the real movement o f the occupants, that can be modelled with the use of computational tools.

This study presents a novel optimization methodology for choosing optimal building retrofitting strategies based on the concept of exergy analysis. The study demonstrates that the building exergy analysis may open new opportunities in the design of an optimal retrofit solution despite being a theoretical approach based on the high performance of a Carnot reverse cycle. This exergy-based solution is different from the one selected through traditional efficient retrofits where minimizing energy consumption is the primary selection criteria. The new solution connects the building with the reference environment, which acts as an unlimited sink or unlimited sources of energy, and it adapts the building to maximize the intake of energy resources from the reference environment. The building hosting the School of Architecture at the University of Navarra has been chosen as the case study building. The unique architectural appearance and bespoke architectural characteristics of the building limit the choices of retrofitting solutions. // therefore, retrofitting solutions on the facade, roof, roof skylight and windows are considered in multi-objective optimization using the jEPlus package. It is remarkable that different retrofitting solutions have been obtained for energy-driven and exergy-driven optimization, respectively. Considering the local contexts and all possible reference environments for the building, three unlimited sinks or unlimited sources of energy are selected for the case study building to explore exergy-driven optimization: the external air, the ground in the surrounding area and the nearby river. The evidence shows that no matter which reference environment is chosen, an identical envelope retrofitting solution has been obtained.

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Edición bilingue