Travelling fire wins Best Fire Research Project by SFPE UK

We are delighted to announce that an Imperial-Arup team has won the Best Fire Research Project 2015.
The award, give by the UK Chapter of Society of Fire Protection Engineers and sponsored by H+H Fire was given to the project iTFM: Improved Travelling Fires for the Structural Design of Modern Buildings.
Team members were Egle Rackauskaite, PhD Student at Imperial College London, Guillermo Rein, Principal Supervisor at Imperial College London, and Panos Kotsovinos, Industrial Supervisor at Arup London.

The award judges said “Great piece of research with practical applications. Very interesting subject deserves more research in this area”.

The latest research paper on traveling fires was published in the journal Structures. And the work was also described at an Q&A interview published by the Press Office of Imperial College (see here).

Illustration of a travelling fire and distribution of gas temperatures.

Innovative architectural designs of modern buildings already provide a challenge to structural engineers. This is above all the case in structural fire engineering. However, most of the understanding and current design codes are based on the assumption of uniform fires in a compartment. In previous work, we have shown that fires in large, open-plan compartments, typical of modern architecture, travel from one part of it to another with non-uniform temperature distribution. These fires are referred to as travelling fires. And Travelling Fires Methodology (TFM) has been developed to account for the travelling nature of fires.


Our research also recently received a grant from SFPE to fund a summer collaboration with the group of Prof. Ann Jeffers at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.