Presentation in Cantabria

Francesco Colella delivered a presentation at the International Congress on Smoke Control in Buildings and Tunnels on Thursday 16th October, 2008, in Santander, Spain.

Here is the video (sorry for the poor quality).

Part 1:


Part 2:

Work on Wildfires is Finalist of the 2008 SET Awards

Ross Roxburgh (MEng student working on wildfires) was finalists for the The Bentley Motors Award for the Best Mechanical Engineering Student in the 2008 SET Awards: http://www.setawards.org

Ross has also been awarded the Institute of Mechanical Engineering Project Prize and the John McKenzie Newton Prize to present his paper at the International Conference Forest Fires 2008 in Toledo. The title of his thesis was "Study of Wildfire In-draft Flows for Counter Fire Operations" and the lucky supervisor was Dr Rein.

Awards and Papers at the 9th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science

The 9th Symposium of the International Association of Fire Safety Science was celebrated in Karlsruhe, Germany in Sept 2008. The Edinburgh fire group presented 8 papers and more than 20 posters. The papers were:

.A Comparative Analysis of the Use of Different Zone Models to Predict the Mass Smoke Flow for Axisymetric and Spill Plumes

.The Effect of Model Parameters on the Simulation of Fire Dynamics

.An Architecture for an Integrated Fire Emergency Response System for the Built Environment

.Calculation Methods for the Heat Release Rate of Materials of Unknown Composition

.Collapse of tall buildings in multi-storey fires

.FIRESTRUC - Integrating advanced three-dimensional modelling methodologies for predicting thermo-mechanical behaviour of steel and composite structures subjected to natural

.Sensor-linked fire simulation using a Monte-Carlo approach



.Investigation of the Fertilizer Fire aboard the Ostedijk


Some of the papers are also freely accessible in ERA and some of the posters here.

Best Poster Award
Rory Hadden and Guillermo Rein received the Best Poster Award Audience Choice. The poster on Coal Mine Fires is accessible here.

FORUM Student Travel Award
The student Sung-Han Koo received the FORUM Student Travel Award which was introduced this new this year to assist students with travel-related expenses toward their attendance at the 9th IAFSS Symposium in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The award consists of a plaque and a USD $2,000 cash payment to assist the recipient with travel-related expenses. FORUM Student Travel Award nominees must be lead author on a paper accepted for presentation at the 9th IAFSS Symposium and be enrolled in an academic course of study. Sung-Han Koo presented the paper "Sensor-linked fire simulation using a Monte-Carlo approach".

Ben Lawers ascent

We climbed Ben Lawers!

Statue of James Braidwood, first fire fighter

The statue of firemaster James Braidwood is already on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh.



From his Wikipedia entry:
"James Braidwood (1800 - 1861) founded the world's first municipal fire service in Edinburgh in 1824, and was the first director of the London Fire Brigade and is credited with the development of the modern municipal fire service."

Interview for Peruvian magazine Seguridad & Gerencia (in Spanish)

Prof. Torero was interviewed in the Peruvian magazine "Seguridad & Gerencia" by Monica Morales on the current needs of fire safety engineering in the building and process industries.

The article, in Spanish, can be found here [1st part] and here [2nd part].

Seminario Internacional de Seguridad Contra Incendios, Peru

In August 2008, the 'Seminario Internacional de Seguridad Contra Incendios', was organized by Engineering Services SAC, Lima, to gather the fire safety industry in Peru. The programme had three invited speakers from Edinburgh (Prof Torero, Dr Rein and Dr Schemel).

2008 RAEng Silver Medal

Congratulations to Dr Barbara Lane, an Associate Director with Arup, who has won the prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal for her outstanding contribution to British engineering. Dr Lane is a graduated PhD student in Fire Engineering from the University of Edinburgh.

TV Interview

Televisión Nacional del Perú program "Confirmado Mesa Central" interviewed Prof Jose Torero, August 2008. Also he was interviewed in the Peru 24-hour cable news channel "Canal N".

Guise Medal

Warm congratulations to Prof. Jose Torero who has received the 2008 Arthur B. Guise Medal from the Society of Fire Protection Engineering. This is the second Guise Medal going to Univ. of Edinburgh, the first went to Prof. Drysdale in 1995. The medal will be given to Jose in a ceremony after his Award Lecture on Oct 14th during the 2008 SFPE The Annual


Update:
Video clips from the presentation:

Clip 1: Introduction to "Dr Hose" and the award.


Clip 2: Introduction to the presentation by Jose Torero.


Clip 3: Conclusion to the presentation by Jose Torero.

Old News and Announcements until July 2008

Since august 2008 we moved our News and Announcements to this blog. The old News, Announcements and Media website (used until July 2008) can still be visited here (includes pieces from 2001):

http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/fire/old_news.html

2008 Quigley Award for joint student with University of Western Ontario

Congratulations to Stephanie Macphee who has received the 2008 RM Quigley Award for her excellent academic performance in Geotechnical Engineering at The University of Western Ontario. Stephanie is a graduate student at UWO jointly supervised from UoEdinburgh by Dr Rein and working on a simulation tool for STAR (remediation technology for contaminated land using smouldering combustion).

BBC Horizon on FireGrid and WTC

BBC Horizon show 'Skyscraper Fire Fighters' featuring FireGrid and the Dalmarnock Tests, 24 April 2007.

* Three minute clip from the programme on YouTube.
* Eight minute Video Podcast from BBC Horizon:
mp4 version (23Mb, for Quicktime, iPod and Mac users), or
avi version (22Mb, for other media players and Windows users, may require DivX 6 installation)

By July 2008, the documentary had been broadcast by BBC UK, SBS Australia, RTE Ireland, TVB Hong Kong, Noga Israel, Al Jazeera Qatar, Chello Multicanal Spain, Eidiseis Star Greece, RTL Belgium, Canal Z Canada, Vox Germany, EBS Korea, Documentary Channel New Zealand, Prava I Prevodi Serbia and BBC Singapore.

Read also the accompanying article in BBC News "A new kind of fire fighting" by Prof. Jose Torero (24 April 2007).

Radio Interview

BBC Radio 4 interviewed Dr Luke Bisby and Dr Barbara Lane on Structural Fire Engineering. Download postcast of the programme [here].

Fire Tartan

The Centre now has a 'corporate' tartan (see webpage background), it is officially known as Edinburgh Fire and has been approved by the world tartans register. The tartan was designed and produced (by Andrew Elliot Weavers) using the prize money from the Best Paper award from the 5th Fire & Explosion Hazards International Seminar and from the 'Bodycote Warrington Fire Research Prize for the Best Paper in Fire Safety Engineering' last year (see news: April & July 2007). The tartan is a modified version of the University of Edinburgh tartan, which was launched in 2007, but with added 'fire' colours.

2008 Lessells Scholarship

Rory Hadden has received the Lessells Travel Scholarship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to visit the University of California at Berkeley and expand his PhD research in smouldering combustion.

Updated Sept 2008:
Rory's research was highlighted in The Herald when he took part at a Scottish Government reception in the Edinburgh Castle bringing together "the best talent of the new generation of Scotland's scientists".

Building safer by design

Dr Luke Bisby has been appointed Arup Foundation /Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellow in Structures and Fire and joins the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering as a Reader. [News Release].

Help with Wikipedia entries

We are looking for volunteers to edit these Wikipedia entries:

BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering


Dalmarnock Tests


Cardington Tests


Prof David Rasbash

Staticstics of paper downloads (April 2008)

In a small research community like fire engineering, impact factors in journals designed for much large communities in Medicine, Geography and Economics does not really describe the importance of the contributions to the state of the art. Alternative impact factors could be more indicative of the situation. For example the numbers of downloads of papers in the web could be one. I have just consulted the last statistics from Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). It is a different story. See below another way of quantifying of our impact (in absolute terms and within the context of The University of Edinburgh).

ERA hosts 242 collections and 1,570 papers from the University of Edinburgh at large. It has registered 192,749 downloads mostly from USA, UK and China.

We are the most downloaded collection in the whole University. We have 13 authors in the top 50 most downloaded. We have 11 papers in the top 50 most downloaded.

Details attached.

--------ERA www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk ---- 16/04/2008

in TOP 50 COLLECTIONS
ERA collection downloads since 2006
#1 BRE Research Publications 14,634
#2 Institute of Geography 9,982
#3 Management School and Economics 8,764
#17 BRE PhD thesis collection 3,038

in TOP 50 AUTHORS
ERA name downloads since 2006
#1 Torero, Jose 10,745
#2 Usmani, Asif 6,292
#5 Welch, Stephen 4,264
#6 McLaughlin, Stephen 4,168
#7 Carvel, Ricky 3,975
#21 Rein, Guillermo 2,693
#23 Jowsey, Allan 2,591
#25 Fletcher, Ian 2,442
#27 Lane, Barbara 2,364
#28 Steinhaus, Thomas 2,358
#40 Lamont, Susan 1,636
#45 Flint, Graeme 1,448
#46 Fuentes, Andres 1,407

in TOP 50 PAPERS
ERA downloads since 2006 title
#12 1097 The behaviour of concrete structures in fire
#21 854 Study of a non-buoyant diffusion flame radiative
#25 820 Light Steel Framing: Improving the Integral Design
#26 803 Fire Size in Tunnels
#27 795 Large-scale pool fires
#28 794 Interactions between the Reaction Zone and Soot Field #36 721 How did the WTC towers collapse: a new theory
#39 634 Determination of Fire Induced Collapse Mechanisms of
#42 577 A Study of Fire Durability for a Road Tunnel: Comparing #45 562 Performance of concrete in fire: a review of the state
#47 549 Behavior of Structures in Fire and Real Design - A Case

Paolo Pironi receives Student Research Award

Paolo Pironi has been awarded the second prize at the 2008 Student Research Contest in Groundwater Practices sponsored by Geosyntec Consultants, Canada. Paolo's STAR experiments have enable to patent a novel remediation technology for contaminated soil using smouldering combustion.

Dec 2009 UPDATE: STAR's work has been published in the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute