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The Edinburgh Fire Research Center (formerly the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering) is the research group at The Institute of Infrastructure and Environment, University of Edinburgh, conducting research in Fire Protection Engineering.
The University of Edinburgh was the first university to offer a degree in Fire engineering. Leaders in the field came to Edinburgh to study and research under the supervision of Rasbash, a pioneer of the discipline, and Dougal Drysdale, author of a textbook on the subject. [1] Jose Torero held the BRE/RAE Chair in Fire Safety Engineering from 2004 to 2012. Albert Simeoni held the BRE chair from 2013 to 2015. Grunde Jomaas held the BRE chair from 2016 to 2021. Teaching and research in fire safety continues at Edinburgh under the leadership of Prof Luke Bisby, professor of fire and structures.
The staff of the Edinburgh Fire Research Centre comprises six academics, several research associates, about 20-25 postgraduate researchers and some undergraduate researchers.
The Centre supports the Structural and Fire Safety Engineering degrees (BEng, MEng and MSc) as well as a number of short courses for professionals.
The centre is part of the International Master of Science in Fire Safety Engineering consortium. The joint degree started in September 2010 and involves the universities of Edinburgh (UK), Ghent (Belgium) and Lund (Sweden). [2]
The Cardington tests were a series of large-scale fire tests conducted over several years from the early 1990s in a real steel-framed structure at the former airship hangar at Cardington, UK.
The Dalmarnock tests were a series of fire experiments conducted in July 2006 in a real 1960s concrete tower block in Dalmarnock, Glasgow, UK.
The Centre publishes more than 100 conference papers and a dozen peer-reviewed journal papers per year. Some can be publicly accessed via their Digital Repository.
The World Trade Center in New York City collapsed on September 11, 2001, as result of the al-Qaeda attacks. Two commercial airliners hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists were deliberately flown into the Twin Towers of the complex, resulting in a total progressive collapse that killed almost 3,000 people. It is the deadliest and costliest building collapse in history.
Cardington is a village and civil parish in the Borough of Bedford in Bedfordshire, England.
Earthquake engineering is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering that designs and analyzes structures, such as buildings and bridges, with earthquakes in mind. Its overall goal is to make such structures more resistant to earthquakes. An earthquake engineer aims to construct structures that will not be damaged in minor shaking and will avoid serious damage or collapse in a major earthquake. A properly engineered structure does not necessarily have to be extremely strong or expensive. It has to be properly designed to withstand the seismic effects while sustaining an acceptable level of damage.
The Technical University of Braunschweig, commonly referred to as TU Braunschweig, is the oldest Technische Universität in Germany. It was founded in 1745 as Collegium Carolinum and is a member of TU9, an incorporated society of the most renowned and largest German institutes of technology. It is commonly ranked among the top universities for engineering in Germany. TU Braunschweig's research profile is very interdisciplinary, but with a focus on aeronautics, vehicle engineering including autonomous driving and electric mobility, manufacturing, life sciences, and metrology. Research is conducted in close collaboration with external organizations such as the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, several Fraunhofer Institutes, and Germany's national metrology institute (PTB), among many others. As one of very few research institutions of its type in the world, the university has its own research airport.
Fire protection engineering is the application of science and engineering principles to protect people, property, and their environments from the harmful and destructive effects of fire and smoke. It encompasses engineering which focuses on fire detection, suppression and mitigation and fire safety engineering which focuses on human behavior and maintaining a tenable environment for evacuation from a fire. In the United States 'fire protection engineering' is often used to include 'fire safety engineering'.
Structural steel is a category of steel used for making construction materials in a variety of shapes. Many structural steel shapes take the form of an elongated beam having a profile of a specific cross section. Structural steel shapes, sizes, chemical composition, mechanical properties such as strengths, storage practices, etc., are regulated by standards in most industrialized countries.
A fire test is a means of determining whether fire protection products meet minimum performance criteria as set out in a building code or other applicable legislation. Successful tests in laboratories holding national accreditation for testing and certification result in the issuance of a certification listing.
The Building Research Establishment (BRE) is a centre of building science in the United Kingdom, owned by charitable organisation the BRE Trust. It is a former UK government national laboratory that was privatised in 1997. BRE provides research, advice, training, testing, certification and standards for both public and private sector organisations in the UK and abroad. It has its headquarters in Garston, Hertfordshire, England, with regional sites in Glasgow, Swansea, the US, India, the Middle East and China.
The Cardington Fire Tests were a series of large-scale fire tests conducted in real structures at the BRE Cardington facility near Cardington, Bedfordshire, England, during the mid-1990s. After the tests, extensive computational and analytical studies of the behaviour of steel-framed composite structures in fire conditions were carried out by, among others, the University of Edinburgh, Sheffield University, and Imperial College London.
The Dalmarnock fire tests are a series of fire experiments that were conducted in a real high-rise building in the United Kingdom.
Zdeněk Pavel Bažant is McCormick School Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil Engineering and Materials Science in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University's Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Dougal Drysdale is a Professor Emeritus in Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Edinburgh and member of the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering.
José Luis Torero is a professor in fire protection engineering. He is currently the head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London (UK). He took this appointment after two years (2017-2019) as the John L. Bryan Chair in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering and Director of the Center for Disaster Resilience in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Maryland (USA). He was formerly the Head of the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland (2012-2017). He is Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) since 2010, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering since 2014 and The Royal Society of Edinburgh (UK) since 2008. He held the BRE/RAE Chair in Fire Safety Engineering and directed the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering from 2004 to 2012. In 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, being gazetted in the NSW Government Gazette by the then Governor of New South Wales His Excellency General, the Honourable David Hurley AC DSC(Rtd).
National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering is an organisation in Da'an District, Taipei, Taiwan.
Cardington Airfield, previously RAF Cardington, is a former Royal Air Force station in Bedfordshire, England, with a long and varied history, particularly in relation to airships and balloons.
Sir William Henry Glanville CB CBE FRS was a British civil engineer. During World War II he and the Road Research Laboratory were involved in important war work, developing temporary runways, beach analysis, and tank and aircraft design. He also worked on the explosives calculations and scale models used to develop the bouncing bombs used in the Dam Busters Raid.
Jack Raymond Janney, born in Alamosa, Colorado, was a U.S. structural engineer and an innovator in the understanding of structural behavior and a recognized leader in the investigation of structural collapses. Janney's love of mathematics and science spurred his decision to become an engineer, and in 1942, he enrolled in the College of Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. After only one semester, Janney left college and enlisted in the Navy where he became a decorated pilot during World War II.
The NIST World Trade Center Disaster Investigation was a report that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted to establish the likely technical causes of the three building failures that occurred at the World Trade Center following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The report was mandated as part of the National Construction Safety Team Act, which was signed into law on October 1, 2002 by President George W. Bush. NIST issued its final report on the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers in September 2005, and the agency issued its final report on 7 World Trade Center in November 2008.
Venkatesh Kumar R Kodur is a scientist and university professor, currently at Michigan State University. He was born in Kodur village in Karnataka India, received his bachelor's degree in Civil engineering from the University Visveswaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore, India, in 1984. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Queen's University at Kingston, Canada, in 1988 and 1992, respectively. Following a brief stint as a Post-doctoral Fellow at Royal Military College, Kingston, Canada, he joined the National Research Council (Canada), where as senior scientist, he carried out extensive research in structural fire safety field. In 2005, he joined the faculty of Michigan State University (MSU), where he is currently a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Kodur has established unique fire test facilities and highly acclaimed research program in structural fire engineering area at MSU and is the founding director of the Center on Structural Fire Safety and Diagnostics.
Colin F. Bailey is a researcher in structural engineering, who became the President and Principal of Queen Mary University of London in September 2017. Prior to that, Bailey was Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Manchester. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Structural Engineers and a member of the Institution of Fire Engineers.