Thermo-fluid-dynamic and thermo-structural aspects for the application of Fire Safety Engineering to the Courthouse Building of Naples

Fire Safety Engineering is a powerful tool for the design of both passive and active fire safety measures, allowing fire engineers to overcome the rigid prescriptive-based design towards the more flexible performance-based one. In this paper, the application of the performance-based design to a real case study is presented both from life safety and structural safety point of view. The analysed case study is the Courthouse Building of Naples, Tower “A”, a tower 101 m high with 29-storeys above the ground. The main features of the performance based design, such as the choice of performance levels, the definition of fire scenarios, the analyses based on advanced thermo-fluid-dynamic and thermo-mechanical models, are presented. Results allow to verify if the prefixed fire safety objectives have been reached or not and to obtain useful information on additional measures for the improvement of fire safety.