Promat News

Promat DURAWALL^®

16/03/2001

Promat UK Limited has unveiled an exciting new addition to its market leading line-up of passive fire protection products. The Promat DURAWALL® system is a fully certificated fire protection barrier system. It is built around the Promat DURAWALL® composite panel, comprising a steel face with a non-combustible rock wool core. The system is completed by a series of other fully tested products offering fire protection to doors and voids, penetration seals, structural steel and protected zones. The new system has been specially designed for the construction of non-loadbearing internal partition walls that require a tested fire rating to act as firewalls or compartmentation walls. The insurance industry recognises the value of passive fire protection and the important role of compartmentation in improving safety and potential losses in this area. And as the result of new fire regulations introduced last October, more and more businesses are looking for fully tested and certificated fire protection systems. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order, it will be up to employers or building owners to ensure fire safety within the workplace – whatever the building’s age, condition or ownership. The order will also include the duty to prevent the spread of fire and to minimise business disruption. Recent figures show more than half the firms that suffer an incident go out of business within a year. Promat DURAWALL® can help designers meet these demands, particularly for industrial and storage buildings. It provides up to 240 minutes guaranteed fire resistance on the whole system, including doors and voids, penetration seals, structural steel and protected zones, not just the panel as available elsewhere. Moreover, it is not just the products that are certificated: Promat runs a specialist contractor scheme to design and install DURAWALL® systems, and all contractors are third party accredited via the FIRAS scheme. This ensures that the whole system is installed correctly, and receives a full certificate of conformity at completion. “We are extremely excited about DURAWALL®,” says Promat UK’s managing director John Stevenson. “It delivers guaranteed fire protection performance for the client, therefore offering the kind of peace of mind that only a fully certificated system can provide. And with our specialist contractor scheme, clients will be receiving the highest standards of product, design, installation and customer care.” The concept of Promat DURAWALL® has many benefits over more traditional methods of constructing fire walls such as blockwork and plasterboard. It is installed using a dry construction technique, so there is no need to strengthen foundations or the main structure of a building. Longer unsupported spans – DURAWALL® is fire rated at spans up to 9m – can also dramatically reduce installation times. Promat DURAWALL® can be installed at speeds of up to 200m2 per day, in sharp contrast to traditional masonry construction and the labour intensive build-up required for installing tall barriers or achieving fire ratings using plasterboard. In the insurance industry, confusion over the use of composite panel systems is widespread. In 2003, the Association of British Insurers published the document ‘Technical Briefing: Fire Performance of Sandwich Panel Systems’. It made a great deal of the benefits of compartmentation, and the reliability and high fire performance of ‘non combustible’ rock wool cored panels. The Promat DURAWALL® system is designed to satisfy both aspects, and as such is widely respected by the insurance sector.

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