Clearview National April 2015 - Issue 161 | Page 66

FIRESAFETY& SECURITY

The Fire
Door That
Offers More
»»Fire safety
regulations are nothing new to
the industry, but designing an
emergency escape door that also
offers high security is. Here Jeff
Pearson, Sales and Marketing
Director at Jack Aluminiu m talks
about what is stoking commercial
emergency escape door design in
today’s market.
Designing doors for fire safety
regulations remains a top priority
for commercial doors. People
know what is needed to meet
them, but emergency escape
doors also need to perform higher
on security and specifiers are
under pressure to find a door that
can do both.
The problem is that even with
measures in place to meet more
demanding security requirements,
emergency escape doors are still
vulnerable to attack. By their
nature they are quick to release
and often on the perimeter of
buildings. This makes them
an immediate security risk for
tampering either with a wire
threaded under or over the door
to hit the panic bar device or
forced entry, so they are locked
when the premises are left
empty.
This disables the panic bar
completely so if the door is
accidently left locked whilst the
building is occupied, or a person
is left in the building after the
door is locked, the door won’t
open from inside. This creates a
fire safety issue.
Security performance is being
pushed even further up the
agenda for specifiers now that
Secured by Design is being listed
more commonly as a requirement
in tenders for schools, hospitals,

hotels and new
homes. In the last
year, the Police
initiative has
published three
new guides to help developers,
architects and planners design
out crime in homes, schools and
commercial buildings.
Secured by Design requires
doorsets to go through rigorous
testing at extreme levels by a
UKAS accredited certification
body such as BM Trada, and the
expectation is for door security
to meet minimum standards,
including PAS 24.
Door manufacturers and
fabricators are faced with the
challenge of creating the perfect
emergency escape door that
does it all for specifiers – a door
that tackles fire safety and high
security.
The shortcut to this is often to
adapt an existing door. But it’s
not good enough to just add bits
on as an afterthought. Without
the investment into research and
development, and testing it will
only create a clumpy, awkward
door with increased cost which is
passed down the supply chain and
makes products less competitive.
Jack Aluminium knew an
emergency escape door would
need to resolve the problem of
securing anti-panic doors, so
it designed high performance
locking in from the start with the
TD68 Pivot Anti-Panic Door.
The TD68 Pivot Anti-Panic
Door features a unique rebated
low threshold and lock strike plate
below 15mm to comply with
the Disability Discrimination
Act (DDA). The rebate prevents
tampering of the internal panic

66 » A PR 2015 » CL EARVI E W- UK . C O M

device from a wire under or over
the door leaf and the strike plate
supports the lock during an
attack where external doors are
vulnerable to forced entry.
It also incorporates the Adams
Rite Sentinel M 3 Point Antipanic Lock with 3 star security
cylinder. It can still be opened
in an emergency from the inside
using a standard panic door exit
device but the unique design
means the door can be locked
internally to ensure it is secure on
the outside.
Delivering Secured by Design
in emergency escape doors down
the supply chain was a focus for
Jack Aluminium. It worked with
BM Trada to achieve the PAS 24
security standard and Q-Mark
certification under the Enhanced
Security Door Scheme for the
TD68 Pivot Anti-Panic Door.
To help customers this data was
cascaded down to manufacturers
and fabricators to make achieving
the requirements set out by

Secured by Design with the
doorset easier and quicker.
With fire safety and security
sorted, Jack Aluminium added in
another benefit, energy efficiency.
As there is growing demand
to make commercial building
products more energy efficient,
the TD68 Door also includes
a thermally broken threshold
to achieve a U-value of 1.7W/
m2K, making it one of the most
thermally efficient commercial
doors available.
Jack Aluminium’s approach to
designing commercial aluminium
doors is best summed up by the
concept of Value Engineering,
which defines the value of a
product by its ability to satisfy
performance requirements and
remain competitively priced.
It’s the reason why all of its
products are designed from
scratch to cut out the extra
costs and why they’re tested to
meet the increasingly stringent
requirements.