francesca_sfpe_malaga

Francesca was awarded a 2020 Research Grant from the SFPE Foundation for large-scale fire experiments in collaboration with ITB Poland. These experiments will investigate the mechanical performance of curtain wall facades exposed to fire.

The picture was taken during the 2019 SFPE European conference in Malaga; we are looking forward to future SFPE conferences!

News from Hazelab

News from Hazelab

Dr Ashraf Ben El-Shanawany Memorial award

Harry Mitchell was one of two PhD students awarded the Dr Ashraf Ben El-Shanawany Memorial award for his research on fire safety hazards in tall timber buildings. The award is dedicated to Dr El Shanawany, an Engineering PhD student in the Nuclear group who passed away shortly after completing his thesis. The award focuses highlights students who have shown exemplary research, innovation, and outreach to the public during their studies. The award ceremony will be later in the year where Harry and Guillermo will attend. Congratulations, Harry!

News from Hazelab

News from Hazelab

Outreach dyson School

Outreach COP26

Francesca and Simona took part in a showcase organised in response to COP26 and the environmental crisis, aimed at highlighting the diversity of work across departments and promoting opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. They discussed topics of their research that link sustainability with fire safety: wildfires, electrification of vehicles, timber buildings and facades. Thanks to the Centre for Environmental Policy, Dyson School of Design Engineering, and Business School at Imperial College for organising this event.

News from Hazelab

Zhenwen Award

Zhenwen paper award

Our computational research on battery self-ignition led by Dr Zhenwen won a prize for outstanding paper in the 2nd Symposium on Lithium Battery Fire Safety, Hefei, China. This is the only conference worldwide dedicated to battery safety, and it was attended by 600 scientists and engineers.

The paper title is “Benchmarking between COMSOL and Gpyro models in predicting self-heating ignition of Lithium-ion batteries” by Z. Hu, X. He, F. Restuccia, and G Rein.

Read the full paper

Science Museum team

Science Museum event

The amazing Hazelab team spent two solid days answering a myriad of questions on wildfires at the Science Museum of London. The group took part in the 2021 Great Exhibition Road Festival and spent the weekend exploring how wildfires are good and bad but always fascinating, and how we expect them to evolve with climate change. Our stand included a live demonstration of a firewhirl, run every 15 minutes. So many doubts cleared from the minds of young future engineers!

SFPE UK award

Matt's SFPE UK award

Dr Matthew Bonner was awarded the 2021 SFPE UK Chapter Award for Best Fire Research Project. The award is given to UK based research projects that present novel techniques, could have a large impact on the fire engineering community, and have the potential to be built upon in the future. Dr Bonner's work, in collaboration with other members of Imperial Hazelab, Instytut Techniki Budowlanej (ITB), and Arup, studied the fire safety of the external walls of tall buildings (facades) and used statistical methods to learn from commercial fire safety tests.

News from Hazelab

El-Shanawany Memorial Prize

Eirik was awarded the Dr Ashraf Ben El-Shanawany Memorial Prize! Dr El Shanawany was an Engineering Doctorate student at Imperial College, who died in 2017, shortly after finishing his thesis entitled Uncertainty Quantification in Probabilistic Safety Analysis. The prize is awarded for outstanding achievement in research, public outreach, and innovation with focus on safety. We are proud of Eirik and honoured for this medal.

News from Hazelab

wildfire cars

Evacuation from Wildfires grant

Imperial Hazelab is part of three research grants recently won to simulate the evacuation from wildfires. Funders are NIST in USA, Royal Academy of Engineering (Safer Complex Systems) in the UK and NRC in Canada. In the context of the ferocious wildfires in the West Coast, especially in California and Oregon, and when 500 thousand people have been evacuated from their homes, a computational tool that allows for better and faster evacuations is essential. This is a collaboration with University of Lund (Sweden), Movement Strategies (UK), RMIT (Australia), NRC (Canada) and NFPA (USA).

Contact Us

Phone:
+44 (0)20 7594 7036

Email:
g.rein@imperial.ac.uk

Address:
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
City & Guilds Building,
South Kensington Campus, London, SW7 2AZ, UK