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September, 2011
Other Funded Research Projects
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The Council is pleased to announce that a CTBUH-affiliated research program aiming to address the threat of fires to tall buildings has recently received funding from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
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The project will be steered primarily by the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, UK. CTBUH Fire & Safety Working Group Co-Chair José Torero is the Principle Investigator of the project and will be supported by Co-Investigators Luke Bisby, Martin Gillie, Stephen Welch, Asif Usmani and Guillermo Rein. The team is comprised of several prominent players in the field of tall buildings representing all major stake holders in both fire safety and tall building design, including: the CTBUH, WPI, Scottish Building Standards Division, Communities and Local Government (UK), Foster + Partners, SOM, RMJM, Arup, Buro Happold, FM Global, AXA, Zurich, NFPA, NIST, London Fire Brigade, Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Service, Strathclyde Fire and Rescue, BRE, VTT and the Glasgow Housing Authority. With the support of these organizations, the team at the University of Edinburgh hopes to make fire safety engineering a fully integrated, state-of-the-art component of tall building design. |
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José Torero
University of Edinburgh
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| The three-year project entitled “Real Fires for the Safe Design of Tall Buildings” kicks off in November this year. The project is worth over $2M (£1.4 million), of which EPSRC has awarded approximately $1.3M (£815k), with the remainder provided by team members. The project aims to develop and validate a methodology that can adequately and realistically introduce the effects of fire into modern tall building design. The project was conceived through the recognition that tall buildings are rapidly evolving and the implementation of fire safety strategies for these structures cannot fall behind. As these buildings become larger, more complex and leaner in design, we must be able to better quantify the impact of these changes on fire safety. This project proposes to develop this understanding and turn it into a design tool to enable designers to identify the input parameters necessary for optimized design of all aspects of tall buildings, from the architectural definition of space to the structural design. Needless to say, it will provide a basis for the assessment of structural performance, façade design, and egress path protection that meet the needs of an adequate fire safety strategy. |
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The project will constitute an extensive modeling study and multiple large-scale fire tests. Five state-of-the-art, highly instrumented, large-scale experiments will be carried out at the burn-hall facility at BRE in the UK, scheduled to take place in November 2012. These tests will contain thousands of sensors allowing for a complete characterization of the fire as it travels around the large, purposefully designed compartments. The resolution of the sensors will be comparable with that of state-of-the-art fire modeling tools, thus the resultant comprehensive data set will provide the basis for subsequent model development, validation and verification. The test configurations will be designed in consultation with model developers to ensure that these unique tests will provide the most useful information possible for future applications. The validated models will provide the understanding from which a design tool can subsequently be created. The project will culminate with this tool being validated against a final large-scale test, scheduled to be carried out in March 2014. This final test will take place in an actual tall building provided by the Glasgow Housing Authority, in a situation similar to the 2006 Dalmarnock Fire Tests. The test will be highly instrumented in order to provide the most comprehensive and accurate data possible.
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| Windsor Building fire, Madrid |
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| CCTV Hotel fire, Beijing |
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