The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport will adjust the inter-floor fire compartmentation standards for equipment and piping rooms in semiconductor manufacturing plants to reflect on-the-ground realities, and will establish standards for recognizing the quality of new products.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) said it will preannounce legislation from July 15 to Aug. 24 for partial amendments to the Enforcement Decree of the Building Act and the Rules on Standards for Egress and Fireproof Structures of Buildings.
The move focuses on reasonably adjusting excessive regulations by taking into account the voices from actual industrial worksites, while also refining some shortcomings revealed in the course of system operations.
Looking at the main points of the amendment, first, the application of inter-floor fire compartmentation in semiconductor plants will become more flexible. Semiconductor production facilities frequently need to lay new equipment piping or relocate it due to frequent process changes. However, under the existing system, each change to the piping required breaking and rebuilding the fire compartmentation in hard concrete floors, causing major difficulties on site.
Accordingly, going forward, if the piping space is separated from other areas, equipped with sprinklers after a professional review by the performance-based design evaluation panel of the National Fire Agency, a separate inter-floor fire compartment will not be required. This is expected to alleviate the burdens at manufacturing sites while maintaining fire-blocking capacity comparable to existing fire compartments.
The scope of quality recognition will also be expanded so that new building materials can enter the market quickly. Until now, among five major materials directly tied to fire safety, only fire-resistive structures were eligible for new product quality recognition. As a result, even if technologies were newly developed for the remaining four items—fire doors, fire shutters, fire-stopping assemblies, and composite materials—there were no clear standards to verify performance, making on-site adoption difficult. Through this system improvement, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) will revise the system so that when innovative products emerge in the four categories other than fire-resistive structures, tailored recognition standards can be established after review by an expert advisory committee.
The installation rules for composite fire shutters to improve space utilization have also been clarified. Considering the trend toward more open spaces such as large shopping malls, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) established standards in February for a composite fire shutter that combines a fire door and an automatic fire shutter. As a follow-up, this amendment simplifies the standard by removing overlapping rules that required additional doors when installing composite fire shutters. At the same time, it strengthens personal information protection by removing fields that unnecessarily required the dates of birth of manufacturers, distributors, and contractors from administrative forms.
Jeong Seung-su, head of the Building Safety Division at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), said, "This amendment rationally reflects changes in industrial worksites and new technologies in the building system while ensuring fire safety in buildings," and added, "We will continue to push for reasonable improvements to the building system by putting public safety first and actively incorporating voices from industrial worksites."