Congratulations to Dr Angus Law and co-authors for winning the
2011 Lloyd’s Science of Risk Prize in the Biological/Technological category for their paper on travelling fires for structural design. Dr Law graduated in 2010 with a PhD in Fire Safety Engineering from the University of Edinburgh and now works at Arup. The Science of Risk Prize was launched by Lloyd’s to stimulate cutting edge research into the latest emerging risks facing businesses.
Design for infrastructure protection
The winning paper is "
The Influence of Travelling Fires on a Concrete Frame"
(published in
Engineering Structures 33), led by
Dr Law and co-authored by
Dr Stern-Gottfried,
Dr Gillie and
Dr Rein. The work argues that the trend towards open plan offices has changed the types of
fire likely to occur in modern buildings. It uses science to look
at ways to improve engineering guidelines and building design, reduce
the risk of travelling fires, and help insurers better quantify and
model fire risk. The presentation given by Dr Law at the award's ceremony built on the concepts of acceptable risk and the margin of error of design methods in the contextt of the engineering duty to use the world’s limited resources as efficiently as possible (see presentation
here). The work was founded by
BRE Trust and
Arup.
Best runner-up
The best runner-up in the same category was our graduate
Dr Sung-han Koo for his paper "
Sensor-steered fire simulation" (published in Fire Safety Journal and co-authored by
Dr J Fraser-Mitchell and
Dr S Welch)
2010 Awards
This is the second time that Edinburgh recieves the award. Last year Dr Francesco Colella won the
2010 (inaugural) prize in Technology for the paper "
A Novel Multiscale Methodology for Simulating Tunnel Ventilation Flows During Fires". And Dr Wolfram Jahn (in Technology)
and Dr Claire Belcher (in Natural Hazards) were short-listed within the
top five submissions.
