Highlights

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

London Bridge

Stolen Climate: Global Perspectives Of Fire on Earth

The Stolen Climate exhibition by the Leverhulme Center featured a lot of discussion on the intersection of fire science, society and art. Guillermo presented about his side of fire as a fire scientists, while Harry, Nick and Simona ran the Fire Tornado demonstration to a mesmerised audience.

Link to Leverhulme post!

cyprus

Visit from Dr. Petrou, from European University of Cyprus

Dr Klelia Petrou from European University of Cyprus (EUC), visited Imperial Hazelab. Klelia shared the wildfire situation in Cyprus and work related to ongoing wildfire projects she and EUC are currently collaborating on. Hazelab also gave a tour of the lab facilities with a demonstration of the fluid dynamics of fire using a fire tornado. Discussions were had over lunch about future collaborations together and we very much look forward to seeing Klelia again, both in Cyprus, at EUC, and at Imperial!

Link to post!

itb visit

Simona returns from PyroLife Secondment at ITB Poland

Simona recently returned from a PyroLife secondment at ITB Poland in Warsaw. The research exchange took place from September to December 2022, supervised by Prof. Wojciech Węgrzyński and focused on FDS simulations of firebrand accumulation. Simona also visited various ITB fire experiments, including green wall tests and full scale compartment fire tests. Simona worked alongside visiting PhD student Iffah Zulmajdi from Malaysia, ITB PhD student Jakub Bielawski, and Ukrainian post-doc Nadija Spodyniuk. Thank you Wojciech!

Link to post!

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!

Hazelab alumni, Dr. Matt Bonner visits

We want to thank, Hazelab alumni Dr. Matt Bonner from FireTrigon for his visits and the torrent of great advice to everyone in Hazelab. We discuss fire engineering, casual inference, graph theory, machine learning and top interview tips. You are a great visiting scholar and we look forward to many more of these in the future!

Link to post!

Hazelab visits alumni, Dr. Francesco Restuccia's lab at KCL

We are thankful and lucky enough to visit Hazelab alumni, Dr. Francesco Restuccia at Kings College London and get a tour of his research labs. The campus is beautifully located in Waterloo, London. Francesco's research is multidisciplinary in thermal sciences covering bioenergy, combustion, fire science, and heat transfer. He has a growing profile in lithium-ion battery heat transfer research, focusing on safety aspects such as ignition prevention and improving overall thermal performance.

Link to post!

News from Hazelab

Field experiment of peatland wildfires in Sumatra

Hazelab published recently one of the most important studies of the research group. In this project called GAMBUT, the Indonesia word for peat, was conducted in a degraded peatland of Sumatra the largest and longest to-date field experiment of peat wildfires. GAMBUT provides a unique understanding of peat wildfires at field conditions that can contribute to mitigation strategies. It took 2 years to fund, 2 years to prepare, 2 months to conduct and 3 years to write. With thanks to Universitas Indonesia, LSE. Special thanks to ERC, Republic of Indonesia, EPSRC and NERC for additional funding.

Read the full paper

Best Fire Research Project Award 2022 - CodeRed

Our collaborators, Arup, have received the award from the SFPE UK Chapter for the CodeRed series of experiments. Arup explored the fire safety of open-plan offices with a mass timber ceiling in collaboration with Imperial Hazelab at CERIB in France. Four of the largest timber experiments to date were carried out in 2021 to support the future fire-safe design of timber buildings. Harry Mitchell, Rikesh Amin, and Simona Dossi, the former two PhDs sponsored by Arup, were collaborators in this project, travelling to France to support instrumentation setup and post-experiment data analysis. Hazelab alumni Dr Mohammad Heidari, Dr Eirik Christensen, and Dr Egle Rackauskaite were also key leaders of the project.

Link to announcement!

Fire Training Session - UK Forestry Commission

Guillermo, Harry, Nikolaos and Wuquan attended a training session on vegetation and prescribed fire, run by the UK Forestry Commission. In the training, we worked with Rob Gazzard and Andy Elliott to investigate how real fires behave, how fuel breaks are quickly formed in case of wildfire, and how to plan out and execute prescribed burns. It was a great opportunity to face real fires and understand what the physical representation of flame length and fire intensity is. Many thanks to Rob, Andy, and the Forestry Commission for this wonderful opportunity.

Link to post!

News from Hazelab

Hazelab Research Excellence Award

The 2022 President’s Awards ceremony took place on 27 June and included accolades for several members of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Excellence in External Collaboration and Partnerships”, the Hazelab group (Thermofluids division) was recognised for their academic achievements, the development of lasting external collaborations, and the impact of their research inside and outside Imperial.

Read the press release!

New scholarship to support a Mechanical Engineering student

A donation from Trigon Fire Safety Ltd has created a new £50,000 scholarship fund in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial.
The scholarship will be available to one female undergraduate student and will provide a stipend for living expenses for the duration of their studies. The funding will open for applications in the academic year 2022-23.
Professor Guillermo Rein (Hazelab group) and the Advancement Team at Imperial College London have worked with Trigon Fire Safety Ltd to widen access to engineering educational excellence!

Read the press release!

Flash Points 2021 Winner - Dwi Purnomo

All the videos submitted were of exceptionally high quality, however there was one that stood out the most. The winner is Dwi Purnomo! Who submitted a stunning video on "Remote Sensing of Peatland Wildfires". which not only impressed the judges in its content but also its production quality.

Watch the video!

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.

Travelling fire podcast

New episode on the Fire Science Show

Prof. Guillermo Rein was invited for a second time to The Fire Science Show to tell the origin story, recent developments and future plans related to the travelling fire methodology developed in great part here at Imperial College and used as a design tool for buildings all around the world.

Listen to the episode

The fire science show

The Fire Science Show

Guillermo and Matthew were invited to the Fire Science Show, the new podcast run by Wojciech Węgrzyński available on all platforms. Guillermo was the first guest of the podcast and in episode 002 he talks about smouldering megafires and a lot more. Matt in episode 003 discusses his PhD work on the fire safety of the facades.

Listen to the podcast!

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

francesca's video

x-ONE Paper Published

A very important paper led by Hazelab was finally published. The paper reports observations from a large-scale fire experiment x-ONE conducted in Poland in 2017. The objective of x-ONE was to capture experimentally a natural fire inside a large and open plan compartment. With an open-plan floor area of 380 m², x-ONE is the largest compartment fire experiment carried out to date! The paper will be available on the 1st of October 2021.

ht lab mugs

Adapting to Remote Learning

During the pandemic, our team created and run a home experiment for the heat transfer laboratory session for second-year mechanical engineering students. The 168 heat transfer kits were assembled by Harry in his home office!

More about the lab

Dwi's Artbook

Hazelab Artbook by Dwi

During the pandemic, Dwi created artistic images of Hazelab members by modifying photos in very creative ways. The images are inspired by our individual work and have been collected in an artbook. They are really really cool, thanks Dwi

Check out the Artbook!

News from Hazelab

francesca's video

Francesca wins the 2021 PhD Summer Showcase

Francesca was awarded the first prize at the 2021 PhD Summer Showcase. The competition is organized by the Graduate School every year to celebrate the research being carried out by the College’s PhD students. Francesca submitted a 3-minute video entitled "Fire Safety of Glass Facades" and won over the jury with her lovely illustrations. Well done!

Watch the video!

smoking peat

Review of emissions from smouldering peat fires

Hazelab’s 2018 review paper on smoke emissions from smouldering wildfires has been selected for the Special Issue in International Journal of Wildland Fire in celebration of the journal’s 30th anniversary. The paper was selected as one of the top 15 reviews published in the past 12 years (more than 700 papers!)

Read the paper

smoking peat land

IAFSS Awards !

Guillermo was awarded the FORUM Mid-Career Researcher Award, which recognizes exceptional achievement and demonstrated leadership in the fields of fire safety science.
Francesco Restuccia, Hazelab alumni, was awarded the honorable mention for Best Thesis for the thesis titled Self-heating ignition of natural reactive porous media conferred by Imperial College. While Xinyan Huang, also Hazelab alumni, was awarded the 2020 Early Career Proulx Award.
Congratulations to all!

News from Hazelab

Matts visual fire power

Matt's EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award

Matt has been awarded a grant for the purpose of facilitating the application of his research to the real world, benefiting society at large. He will be developing an algorithm to estimate the heat release rate of a turbulent fire using ordinary video footage. Very Exciting!

guillermo fellowship

2021 Fellow of The Combustion Institute

Guillermo has been named Fellow of The Combustion Institute. The selection committee elected exceptional honorees, each Fellow has made outstanding contributions to the discipline of combustion science in research or in application. This is a lifetime honorific title, congratulations G !!

Check the full list of Fellows

agung supression sketch

‘Magical’ fire suppressant

Research by Agung shows that an environmentally friendly fire suppressant, when combined with water, cuts the amount of time and water needed to extinguish peat fires by 40%. This could be critical in ending pollution-related deaths, devastation of local communities, and environmental damage caused by these fires. Want to know more?

Read the press release!

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.

hot spots

Zombie Fires

Dwi's latest paper about modeling large smoldering fires with cellula automata was the focus of a science article on Wired! Guillermo was interviewed anout the model and discussed the problem of smoldering zombie fires in tropical and artic regions.

Read the Article on Wired

laura flash point video

Flash Points submissions

Hazelab submitted eight videos to the Flash Points communication competition organized by the SFPE London student chapter. Francesca and Matt won an award for outstanding video from the committee! Congrats to Dwi, Agung, Simona, Eirik, Harry and Xuanze, all videos were great!

Watch the videos

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).

batteries

Battery Fires

According to a new review paper by our battery fire research team, battery safety standards do not represent real-world scenarios that could cause fires and are therefore not robust enough to prevent, detect, and suppress battery fires. They believe that fire safety issues with lithium-ion batteries could be addressed with better collaboration across sectors.

Go to the press release

fire of London

Friends of Imperial Webinar

Guillermo was invited to give a talk to Friends of Imperial, a charity which advances education for the public by giving access to extraordinary developments and discoveries taking place at Imperial College London. He explained how science contributes to reduce the worldwide burden of accidental fires and argues that not all fires are bad.

Watch the Recording

News from Hazelab

guillermo happy

The Research Excellence Award

Guillermo received the Research Excellence Award from The Combustion Institute for having published research papers that have had a major impact on the field of combustion science. We are very proud!
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SFPE Award for Chapter Excellence

The SFPE Greater London Student Chapter was awarded the silver medal for their outstanding achievement in 2019, their first year as a SFPE chapter.

Visit the chapter's website!

Matt profile pic

The SFPE Student Scholar Award

Matthew Bonner was awarded the 2020 SFPE student scholar award for his excellent research on facade fires. Congratulation!

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Nat Geo Graphic

Hazelab on National Geographic

Hazelab was featured in an article on British Wildfire on National Geographic. Dream come true.

Check out the article

financial times

Cladding research cited on the Financial Times

Research carried out by Hazelab in collaboration with ITB in Poland was cited in an article of the Financial Times and featured on the front page! The research found HPL and ACP+FR to be the most flammable categories of cladding panels assessed. The study was led by PhD student Matthew Bonner.

Read the article

Jack Watts Award

Francesco Outstanding Reviewer 2020

Francesco was awarded the Jack Watts Award for being an outstanding reviewer for Fire Technology. Good Job!!

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Exhibition Road Festivel

The Great Exhibition Road Festival 2019

Hazelab participated in the 2019 edition of Exhibition Road Festival which brings together Imperial College, the V&A, Science and Natural history Museums. At our stand, we show some of the exciting research that we do and how it benefits society in the shape of technology.

Visit the Festival

sfpe pub

Guillermo receives Arthur B Guise Medal

Guillermo was awarded the 2018 Arthur B Guise medal by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. The medal is assigned to an individual for eminent achievement in the advancement of the science and technology of fire protection engineering. Guillermo was rewarded for his work in the area of research, innovation and education

fired up presentation

The Great Fired-Up of London

Imperial College hosted Fired-up following the event’s success at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. The event is a chance for young, UK based fire researches to meet up and discuss their work in a more informal setting than a traditional conference. A total of 40 students from 4 different UK universities attended the conference. We are looking forward to the 2020 edition!