Raised access flooring is a crucial component in data centre design, providing a flexible solution for managing cabling, airflow, and cooling. When installing doors above these floors, several factors need careful consideration to ensure their function and compliance meet with industry standards.
Benefits of Raised Access Flooring
Raised floors offer an organised pathway for services and data cables below the finished floor, reducing clutter and improving airflow. Correct cable management can prevent the risk of overheating and facilitates easier building services maintenance.
Supporting Heavy Equipment
Although raised floors must be suitably designed and selected to support the weight of heavy equipment such as server racks and other plant equipment, the load rating is a consideration that you do not have to worry about when installing an EBD fire door. Our data centre fire doors, with their tried and tested wrap-around frame designs, are fully self-supported from the wall panel and do not require any additional support below the raised access floor.
Fire Testing and Durability
You can be confident that our doors have not only been fire tested in a representative raised position, but they have also been put through a series of physical durability tests to simulate a raised floor commonly used with modern sandwich panel wall construction.
These physical tests demonstrated that our doorset can achieve a severe duty classification when faced with BS 5234-2 annex F – Door Slamming, G – Crowd Pressure, Point and Line load testing to BS 6180, and the Hard and Soft body impact tests annex E of EAD-210005-00-0505.
Fire Safety Considerations
Raised access flooring tiles are generally not inherently fire-rated. Their primary functions are to manage cables, airflow, and cooling. Therefore, additional measures are often required to maintain compartmentation and fire breaks, particularly in critical areas like under doors.
Vertical Fire Stops
Vertical fire stops should be included under doors to maintain fire compartmentation. These fire stops, often constructed of the same material as the firewall, should extend from the subfloor to the underside of the raised access floor and have suitable fire resistance.
EBD’s Compliance and Public Affairs Director, Dave Timson, comments:
“Incorporating raised access flooring in data centres significantly improves cable management and cooling efficiency. However, ensuring the proper installation and compliance of fire doors is critical to maintaining safety and functionality. Our fire doors, designed to be self-supported and rigorously tested, provide a reliable solution for data centres, ensuring both fire safety and structural integrity above raised floors.”
