Luxury student village is protected by Apollo

Apollo technology lies at the heart of an intelligent fire detection system installed to protect Phoenix Court, a new luxury student village in Bristol city centre.

The specification emphasised the need for minimum unwanted alarms and an open protocol system.

Multi-Alarm Systems .

of Bristol won the contract to supply and commission the fire detection system and recommended Apollo's Discovery range of intelligent fire detectors to meet the client's criteria.

Built by the UK's largest student accommodation company UNITE, Phoenix Court is the first part of Bristol's GBP500 million Cabot Circus retail and leisure redevelopment to be occupied.

At 11 storeys, it is also the tallest building of its kind to be built by UNITE.

It is now home to 277 students who attend both Bristol University and the University of the West of England.

The Phoenix Court fire system is designed around a Multi Ifax 12 loop control panel and includes over 700 Apollo Discovery Multisensors and 360 sounder bases, which interface with the building access system, lifts and fire doors.

Multi-Alarm Systems recommended the Apollo Discovery range because it has a number of features specifically aimed at reducing false alarms.

Barry Dunn, Senior Technical Engineer at Multi-Alarm Systems, explains: "We identified that the areas of high risk for unwanted alarms were the shower rooms, where steam could give a false reading, and kitchen areas where transient levels of smoke or steam from cooking are common".

"The Discovery Multisensor is ideal for this type of environment as it is equipped with an optical smoke and heat sensor and features five programmable sensitivity settings that make it extremely adaptable to differing conditions".

Other features of the Discovery range designed to help eliminate nuisance alarms include automatic drift compensation, a feature that adjusts for environmental conditions such as dust to ensure the detector is not adversely affected, and sophisticated self-monitoring that rejects transient alarms.

The Discovery Multisensor itself uses algorithms to process the signals from its smoke and heat sensors to produce one output on which the decision 'fire/no fire' is based.

Multisensors can be selected to operate as a smoke detector only, a heat detector only, or as one of three combinations of both.

If an 'in combination' selection is made, the signals from each sensor are considered in relation to each other.

The Discovery Multisensor is certified to EN54 standard in every one of its five operating modes and its reliability in the field in reducing nuisance alarm incidents has been proven over several years.

The Phoenix Court fire detection system is designed to L2 standards and configured to enable a phased evacuation controlled by sensor, zone sector or remote networked panel.

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