This one goes out to active fellow fire safety science and engineering colleagues in other countries than Norway (Wojciech Węgrzyński, Grunde Jomaas, Anne Dederichs, Guillermo Rein+++). In Norway, an issue regarding the use of touch-free door openers on fire-rated doors and doors with egress requirements has surfaced. These types of products have seen a high rise in demand post-covid in Norway, and I assume in other countries as well.
Limited testing with both hot and cold smoke has revealed that smoke can trigger these touch-free door openers, resulting in doors opening and closing at times the definitely should not do so. If these doors then also have fire safety and egress requirements, this type of fault can lead to doors not providing their intended function. Apparently there is a large scatter in terms of how sensitive these sensors are, and from what I can see there is no standard specification on how the suppliers should actually test these sensors for fire smoke.
I have not heard about this issue occurring in other countries yet, so I just want to hear if anyone have any experiences dealing with such issues, and if not, a fairly big heads up that this might be a hidden critical issue.
I am including a link to the web site for The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection (DSB), where they outline the problem and have included a video of a limited test with theatre smoke (in Norwegian)
https://lnkd.in/daZ2aqhb
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