A Study on Awareness Rate of the Fire Alarm Sound in the Factory

Most work places operating machines have a lot of background noise that affect evacuation from a factory. Especially, a lot of background noise from utility machines cause delay of awareness of fire alarm sound and also increase death rate. Currently, sky-scraper type factories have been constructed at around big cities because of high land price. The complexity of skyscraper type factories leads to increase death rate on fire.This study was to research problems using experiment as the same workplace sit-uation according to KOFEIS 0305 and the US Fire Protection Handbook. The experiment was conducted using the speakers to produce machine sound(70dB, 80dB, 90dB) in the room. The fire alarm sound was produced from a corridor. Also the exper-iment was done using persons(around 20 years old and without damage of ears) under different conditions such as distance from the alarm system, open and closed doors, machine sounds, and with and without ear protection. As a result of the measurements, it showed that in the case of wearing ear protection, most people could not hear fire alarm sound in the room with closed door. NFPA suggests that the alarm system should be considered of other methods to know alarm sound when the background noise exceeds 85dB or more. Therefore it was concluded that the design of the fire alarm systems should not be applied to the work