CAPABILITIES AND SERVICES
FSEGs successful research and outreach over more than
30 years has earned FSEG a global reputation in safety engineering and a leading
role in addressing many of the threats confronting the world. The
20-strong multi-disciplinary team (15 research staff and five doctoral students)
of mathematicians, physicists, behavioural psychologists, fire safety engineers
and computer scientists has been pushing back the frontiers in the fast-growing
discipline of computational fire engineering, undertaking a unique combination
of leading edge research, large-scale human factors trials, and practical real
world consultancy.
Today, FSEG research and outreach focuses across the
following disciplines:
- Computational fire safety engineering – FSEG is a world leader in fire and evacuation modelling in aviation, the built environment, maritime/offshore and rail infrastructure. These challenging applications require the expertise of the fire and evacuation modelling teams.
- Disaster resilience – Climate change and international terrorism continue to drive demand for FSEGs evacuation modelling research into urban-scale evacuation arising from wildfires, floods, earthquakes, hazmat, terrorism, etc.
- Physical security – FSEGs physical security expertise extends to scenarios involving modelling marauding armed terrorist and chemical warfare agents in crowded places.
- Dispersion of airborne pathogens – This
developing area of research applies the CFD modelling expertise and
software tools of the fire modelling team and the agent-based
modelling of the evacuation modelling team to mitigate the threat of
COVID and other airborne pathogens.
FSEG has developed an international reputation for addressing complex engineering problems associated with safety and human systems. This is demonstrated through;
- the award of international prizes for the quality and impact of its work,
- winning research funding from a variety of sources including EU/EPSRC,
- producing PhD Graduates,
- engaging in challenging consultancy for national and multinational companies, and
- generating outstanding research publications.
Accolades that attest to the groups international standing include:
Queen’s Award Citation:
“The University is a recognised world leader in the area of evacuation model development….”
BCS IT Award presentation:
“The winners not only demonstrate technical innovation, but also show how technology can be used to benefit society at large….,” Judith Scott Chief Executive of the BCS
SFPE (UK Chapter) Best Research Project for 2019 Citation:
“Outstanding, unique and informative research in an area
seldom explored. There is great potential to make the construction
environment and all those who work in it safer from fire and this research
provides data and tools to achieve this objective.”
The Fire Safety Engineering Group's work falls into four main categories: