2011 Lloyd’s Prize to fire research

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.

Related links:

• The Science of Risk - Lloyd’s Research Prize
• Press release from BRE "Centre of Excellence Student Claims Top Prize"
• The University’s BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering
• 2010 Lloyd’s Science of Risk Prize goes to Fire Technology

Students from Glasgow Caledonian University in the lab

Today we have a group of students from Glasgow Caledonian University doing some testing in our lab as part of their studies.

FireForum Award 2011 to IMFSE

The International Master of Science in Fire Safety Engineering (IMFSE) has received the inaugural FireForum Award 2011 in the Social Value category. The IMFSE program is an Erasmus Mundus degree by the EU and coordinated by Ghent University (Prof. Bart Merci) in association with Lund University (Prof. Robert Jönsson) and The University of Edinburgh (Prof. José Torero).

Prof Bart Merci (right) receives the award as coordinator of IMFSE

The award

FireForum Awards is a new Belgium prize to celebrate excelence in fire safety engineering. It is organized by Fire Forum in cooperation with the Federal Public Service Home Affairs and the Federal Civil Security Knowledge (KCCE). The first edition of the awards was celebrated at the Koloniënpaleis, Tervuren, on 17 Nov 2011.

During the ceremony at the Kolonienpaleis