Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/J001937/1
Title:	Real Fires for the Safe Design of Tall Buildings
Principal Investigator:	Torero, Professor JL
Other Investigators:	Rein, Professor G Gillie, Professor M Bisby, Professor LA Welch, Dr S Usmani, Professor A
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:	Arup Group Ltd AXA Group BRE Group (Building Res Establishment) Buro Happold FM Global Research Illinois Institute of Technology National Institute of Standards and Tech Scottish Building Standards Division Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP VTT
Department:	Sch of Engineering
Organisation:	University of Edinburgh
Scheme:	Standard Research
Starts:	01 January 2012	Ends:	31 December 2014	Value (£):	818,920
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Structural Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Construction
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 08 Sep 2011 Process Environment & Sustainability Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
A Fire Safety Strategy is an essential component of the design for a building. It ensures that in the event of a fire, building occupants can be evacuated safely. The main consideration in these strategies is time. The engineer must show that all occupants can evacuate the building without being exposed to the fire. This is particularly difficult in the case of tall buildings where occupants must travel long distances downward before they can exit the building. A rule of thumb to estimate total building evacuation time is one minute per floor. By this rule the 828m, 162 floor Burj Khalifa in Dubai would take more than 2.5 hours to fully evacuate. The 159m, 31 storey TVCC tower in Beijing was engulfed in a fire which spread up the entire height of the building within 15 minutes of ignition. Clearly, it would not have been possible to evacuate occupants in sufficient time to save them from this fire. It is therefore necessary to have a specific Fire Safety Strategy for these unique buildings.Firstly, the fire must be prevented from spreading vertically, confined to one floor for as long as possible, so occupants on floors far enough from the fire can remain safely in the building until the fire is extinguished or runs out of fuel. Secondly, the building must remain standing, again so that people still in the building and the emergency responders that enter it to fight the fire do not perish as in the World Trade Center disaster. Thirdly, the vertical escape routes must remain structurally intact and smoke free to allow safe passage of occupants from the building. If occupants cannot reach the outside of the building in a timely fashion, then the vertical escape routes must act as the outside and once reached, guarantee safety. To provide these three crucial elements and ensure the safety of occupants of tall buildings, designers must be able to approximate in a quantitative manner the fires expected to occur in these buildings. With optimal use of space being the driving force behind these designs, floors often consist of large, open plan compartments. According to the CTBUH, 82% of the tallest 100 buildings are partially or completely office use (62% completely). Fires in large open plan spaces tend not to cover the entire area of the compartment at any instant but instead propagate across it. These fires have been labelled "travelling fires" and given the statistics, it should be expected that these would be typical fires for tall buildings. Despite this, current methods of prescribing fires are based on data obtained with small homogeneously heated 4mx4m (approx) compartments. These methods, used since the beginning of the 20th Century, are still applied to all structures irrespective of their nature.Current state-of-the-art research shows that a realistic definition of the fire is essential to safely provide all three critical components of the Fire Safety Strategy but also that our current analytical and computational tools cannot provide this. This means we cannot provide an adequate quantitative assessment of the Fire Safety Strategy for tall buildings. Designers are thus not capable of assessing if safety measures introduced result in an under or over dimensioned building. Given the level of optimisation required for tall buildings, this is clearly an important weakness in the design process. As large-scale fire testing cannot be done for all possible building configurations, safe designs can only be achieved using properly validated tools. With no sufficiently detailed test data, fire models cannot be said to have been performance assessed, verified and validated for these scenarios. Real data is needed to establish modelling capabilities and identify problems, thus an integrated modelling/testing programme is essential. This project will conduct a series of tests and modelling studies to establish a methodology that generates real fire inputs for the safe definition of a Fire Safety Strategy for tall buildings.
Key Findings
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Organisation Website:	http://www.ed.ac.uk