Poole Fire Protection of Olathe is the winner of the first annual Engineering Innovation Award for fire and life safety design presented by Siemens Building Technologies Division.

The local company—which makes systems that detect, suppress and stop fires in large buildings—won the award for its design-build work at the Connecticut Air National Guard’s Windsor Locks Readiness Center, an army aviation support facility. The design included a FireFinder XLS fire alarm panel that Siemens makes.

Poole Fire Protection used an Enhanced Acoustic Simulator for Engineers (EASE) to make sure that the facility’s P.A. system would be loud enough and clear enough for people to understand prerecorded and live warnings.

The team from Olathe came up with a design that accounted for the building’s hard surfaces, which can play havoc with the acoustics of mass notification systems. The EASE modeling also decreased the number, spacing and tap settings of the speakers that were initially planned for the design, which increased effectiveness and saved money.

“Using the EASE computer modeling software helped us, as well as other engineers and designers, understand and acknowledge the benefit of performance-based modeling up front early in the design phase,” said Michael Knoll, director of solutions sales at Siemens Industry, Inc., in a release. “Providing speakers with characteristics consistent to the speakers used in the modeling ensured that the system would pass testing without having to add or relocate speakers or change speaker tap settings to achieve the required audibility and intelligibility.”

“By approaching the project in this manner, the design-build team did not have to modify speaker locations or tap settings during the pre-final or final testing,” said Jack Poole, principal at Poole Fire Protection. “This ultimately saved time and resources during testing, which allowed the project to be completed as expected.”