Engine room fire safety

The paper characterizes an engine room as a place of a fire’s origin and its spread. It presents potential sources of fire and fire protection onboard. Examples of international rules and regulations are described as well. It also gives the statistics and some scenarios for fires and some recommendations for machine spaces. It presents problems of engine room fire safety, understood as a result of the analysis of different criteria. The engine room was chosen for analysis because many factors whose presence result in a fire could be found there in the way of combustible materials: fuel oil, lubrication oil, hydraulic oil and thermal oil consumed by the main engine, generator engine, boiler, thermal oil heater and hydraulic oil equipment, paints, solvents etc. Sources of potential fires are mainly the hot surfaces of exhaust gas pipes, turbochargers, boilers and waste oil incinerators, ignitions, sparks, static electricity etc. In addition, many engine room fires have an electrical source, such as electrical short-circuits and thermal overheating in the switchboards. Approximately 70% of fires in the engine room have typical scenarios: the outflow of combustible liquid and contact with a hot surface and can reach temperatures between 700–1000°C. They spread rapidly, their power and dynamism depending on the intensity of the outflow of the combustible liquid and its properties, but also the local conditions and the geometry of engine room as well. Fire safety in engine rooms is determined both by good design and the company’s and crew’s focus on fire prevention. Some of the recommendations are high standards of cleanliness in the engine room, regular checks of materials used for insulating high temperature surfaces, attention to fire risks when repairs and maintenance works are carried out and many other factors.