Rosalie Faith Wills Livres

This SpringerBrief presents information on a wide variety of hazards and the damage potential caused by installation of a photovoltaic (PV) system. The current installation practices for PV systems on roofs create electrical, fire, structural, and weather-related hazards that do not comply to current codes, standards and guidance documents. Potential dangers include structural loading, wind loads, hail, snow, debris accumulation, seismic hazards, firefighting hazards, and electrical hazards. Despite the increased popularity of PV systems after the environmental movement, research shows that the costs of installing PV systems outweigh the benefits. Hazards of PV systems on roofs have caused several incidents in the United States; the most notable in Bakersfield, California, and Mount Holly, North Carolina. Designed for fire engineers and professionals, Best Practices for Commercial Roof-Mounted Photovoltaic System Installation offers recommendations to set up PV systems safely and sustainably.

This SpringerBrief presents cutting-edge research on an important aspect of smart firefighting which will improve performance, safety, prediction, and resilience. It demonstrates the viability of real-time decision support for smart firefighting and provides validation data for continued cyber-physical system (CPS) development by using a smart networked fire test bed consisting of a multi-story instrumented building, a variety of fire and non-fire networked sensors, and a computational framework anchored by a Building Information Modeling (BIM) representation of the building. The author conducted well-controlled full-scale fire experiments and represents them in the three-dimensional BIM, allowing for visualization of critical static and dynamic building and fire information. The CPS test bed produces clear evidence about the opportunities for fire safety created by the communication between sensors, BIM, and fire. When applied to fire protection, CPS fuses the emerging sensor and computing technologies with building control systems, firefighting equipment, and apparatus. This SpringerBrief reveals some of the key ways CPS makes firefighting safer and more efficient.