Building Better December 2024
Service Penetration and Firestopping Management in Data Centres
The Successful delivery of complex data centre projects involves careful coordination of varying services passing compliantly between fire-rated compartments. Herein lies the challenge for specialist interior architectural contractors and inter-dependent service providers needing to pass piping, ducting, cable-trays, and other data centre specific building components through partitions from one internal space to another. Additionally, service penetrations require specific and potentially costly fire-stopping materials to maintain the integrity of fire rated compartments in line with building standards. To reduce risk in this area, Ardmac have established a BEP (BIM Execution Plan) defining the process required for interdependent contractors to model and track openings, so our clients have full visibility of the quantity, potential cost, or impact of service penetrations on the construction schedule, reducing the project’s overall risk profile. Ardmac’s end-to-end Service Penetration Management Process is dedicated to setting a sectoral standard, defining the BIM process for the modelling, management, tracking and recording of passive fire-stopping in service-heavy buildings. The ECI (Early Contractor Engagement) stage of the programme is utilised in this case to insert Ardmac’s tailored BEP as a supplementary guide for service providers and the project BIM team. The step-by-step process outlines the most efficient and impactful methods for identifying service penetration locations, generating penetration models with unique identifiers and freezing penetration models before construction commences. Model freeze dates pre-define key milestones in the BEP and create the opportunity to evaluate the impacts of the penetrations on the partitions structural stability and passive fire protection required at each interface. Where the structural stability of partitions may be compromised due to large openings, or clusters of openings, identifying long-lead, high-risk elements such as secondary support steel becomes possible at a much earlier stage in the pre-construction programme. A bespoke master tracker tool, introduced by
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