MSc Thesis is featured on the cover of Fire Risk Managament

The cover article of the last issue of Fire Risk Management is based on the thesis of our MSc student Anna M Jonsdottir (annamalfridur@simnet.is). It is a survey of 29 buildings in the University of Edinburgh quantifying how much of old and modern buildings is outside the range of applicability of the Eurocode for structures and fire.

This is the first time anyone explicitly tells how narrow is the Eurocode's design range for modern architecture.

The article is available in open access in ERA.

Abstract:
A survey of the University of Edinburgh campus underlines the narrow design fire specifications of the Eurocodes for many buildings. The limits set out in the Eurocodes are height less than 4 m, floor plan under 500 m2, amount of glass and thermal inertia not too high or too low, and no vertical openings. In the King’s Buildings, built over a long period of time with many of them from the early 20th century, 66% of the total volume is inside the limitations of the Eurocode. But in the Informatics Forum (a 2008 brand new modern building with lots of open spaces and glass facades), only 8% of the total volume is inside the limitations. One could say that modern building trends are once more moving out of the limits of our current understanding in fire dynamics.