Why Most Entrance Doors Are Swinging Doors But Not Sliding Doors?
To the entrance area, why most of the doors are swing doors but not sliding doors? There are 2 key reasons as below.
1st, the hinge for the swing door is a relatively simple technology and easy to incorporate into cheap, reliable, weather tight openings. Sliding hardware is much less so, the only advantage to a sliding door is the ability for it to disappear into the wall when not needed.
2nd, dying in a fire is disaster to most of people. In commercial buildings, a door serving a load of 50 people is required to swing in the direction of the exit because of a couple of tragic fires. In one scenario a school was on fire and the crush of people pushing towards the exit doors prevented those at the doors from being able to pull the doors open and escape. They all died at the exit. The sliding doors at the grocery store are legal in this scenario because they are made of hinged breakaway panels to prevent trapping occupants if the sliding mechanism fails.
To TSTC, we could provide both swing doors and sliding doors (with panic breakout system), both of them are safe to pedestrians, even they are in emergency.


