Welcome Egle to Imperial Haze Lab

Egle, new PhD student

Yesterday was the first day of Egle Rackauskaite at Imperial College London as my new PhD student. She joins the Imperial Haze Lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Egle is a Civil Engineer (1st Class MEng, Loughborough University) originally from Lithuania. She also spent time at TU Dresden University working on computational analysis of structures.

The preliminary title of her thesis is "Building on the Paradigm Shift: Probabilistic Traveling Fires for Structural Design". As the title implies, her objective is to investigate how enhanced design-fires lead to improved fire engineering calculations and also how to contribute towards the probabilistic analysis of structures in fire. The work will be based on the recent paradigm shift in the field of fire and structures: travelling fires (see recent article in ENR or earlier blog post).

a) Illustration of a travelling fire. b) Resulting temperature-time curve for the thermal exposure of a structural element. From [Stern-Gottfried and Rein 2012]

The design concept of travelling fires was pioneered during 2007‐2012 by Jamie Stern‐Gottfried, Angus Law  and me while we were at the University of Edinburgh. Now at Imperial, I am keen to continue advancing the development of design concepts for structural engineers.

The project is funded by Arup and EPSRC (CASE Convert) and draws from the Memorandum of Understanding between Arup and Imperial College London to build on an already strong relationship in research, business and education. It specifically will contribute towards the named objectives of creating knowledge on “future city infrastructure” and of “doctoral training requirements for future city professionals”.