01 November 2017

Welcoming Yu Wang

Dr Yu Wang started today at The University of Edinburgh, working alongside the IRIS-Fire Project Team.

Yu will be working mainly on the fire experiments within the UK and supporting the experiments occurring in South Africa.

In 2016, Yu obtained his double PhD degrees of Fire Safety Engineering in University of Science and Technology of China and City University of Hong Kong, working on glass façade thermal breakage in fire. After graduation, he worked as a Research Fellow at National University of Singapore and then joined the IRIS-Fire project from the end of 2017. His research interests are informal settlement fire modelling, fire performance of construction materials (e.g. glass and concrete) and fire safety issues in green buildings and renewable resources.

by David Rush

Tags: PDRA, Edinburgh, Yu Wang

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Festival of Creative Learning 2019

The IRIS-Fire team, led by Lesley Gibson will be holding a fire workshop at the 2019 Festival of Creative Learning on Tuesday 19 February 2019.

Any University of Edinburgh staff or student may sign up for the event and but we think it may especially appeal to those with interest in: Fire, urban planning and design, geography and anyone interested in urbanisation in the Global South.

Fires in informal settlements are devastating to those living in these urban environments. After a fire, urban redesign (known as reblocking) can take place to facilitate the provision of formal services such as water and sanitation. Basic fire safety such as adequate spacing between homes may be implemented but innovative fire reduction design is usually not considered.

This workshop will introduce participants to the challenge of informal settlement fires, and will then enable participants to consider fire spread reduction in the designing of a reblocked informal settlement through practical learning and experimentation. Participants will work in teams to decide on a design which they will build out of prefabricated modelled dwellings. All teams will have an equal number of modelled dwellings and will be challenged to arrange the dwellings within a predefined space with a focus on fire spread prevention. At the end of the workshop a fire scientist will be invited to select a dwelling to set alight and we will observe the fire spread of each team’s modelled reblocked settlement and discuss the effectiveness of the various designs.

We have been working on the design of dwellings for the experiment and have a combination of steel and cardboard dwellings. Single dwellings, double dwellings and L-shaped dwellings.

The single dwellings are complete and testing of fuel load and optimal distance has started. Once we have the double and L-shaped dwellings welded together, we will finalise the number of dwellings for each team (it is looking like around 50 at the moment) and the density at which teams will need to arrange their dwellings.