Monday, April 15, 2013

Ways To Improve Physical Security Of Buildings

By Carl Campbell


Ensuring that a building has excellent structural integrity is among the most vital goals of construction, since doing so protects building occupants from damages brought on by strong, sudden forces which can strike at any given time. These include high-risk occurrences like earthquake, fire, blasts, as well as different sources of impact, just like from a car hitting a part of a building, a bridge, or just about any other concrete structure.

In these instances, the disturbance in a structure's foundations compromises its stability, causing either progressive or immediate danger. There are means to mitigate these potential dangers, both for existing structures and new constructions. These include the fortification of non-structural although high-risk building elements and then the installation of more powerful structural support systems, all working to provide improved physical security to buildings.

To improve a building's support system pertains to fortifying its foundations to mitigate the effects of high-impact blows. A few of the mechanisms used to achieve this include placing detailing beams and conducting column jacketing, both of which add to the capacity of the structure to hold its total weight. Cable-supported structures like stadium roofs and suspension bridges, on the other hand, are strengthened through added cable protection mechanisms.

Windows, doors, and walls are some of the non-structural building parts that are nevertheless vulnerable to blasts and projectiles, and usually cause serious injury to individuals when compromised. The answer to reducing the risk they pose is to make them blast proof and resistant to forced entry. Structural firms can ably install FEBR (force entry, ballistic resistant) doors, anti-shatter films as well as window catcher systems for windows, and internal wall construction for walls. These all serve to adapt to many blast design scenarios.

You could tailor-fit doors according to how you want them to behave during and right after impact: first, they can stay elastic during and then operable after; or second, they could plastically deform during the impact to give better protection to occupants. Meanwhile, anti-shatter films are good cushions against shattering windows in case of a blast. As everybody knows, shards pose very high risk to occupants. New wall constructions, on the other hand, are treatable via custom paneling, which can greatly alleviate secondary fragmentation.




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