The Salesforce Tower will soon be completed and overtake the Pyramid as San Francisco's newest and tallest building. I had a great oppertuinity to take a stroll through the construction area early this month and decided to highlight a few aspects of what i learnt and saw. To me when i see cities like this,…
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Engineered Timber and Fire
We have two papers being presented by students at this year's Fire and Materials Conference in San Francisco: Comparing timber adhesive shear strength properties after fire damage Laminated veneer lumber plated connections in fire Engineered timber is built up using adhesives. These adhesives tend to begin to break down at temperatures around 200C. The first paper…
Defining the Future of Fire Safety Engineering in Canada
Research team member, Matthew Smith, and Engineer at global consulting firm, Entuitive, successfully defended his masters thesis: Towards a Performance-Based Fire Design Framework for Composite Steel Deck Construction in Canada . His thesis and defense were of the highest quality that there were no corrections necessary. Matt was subsequently nominated for the university's senate medal (he…
Our Human Behavior and Fires work continues to grow at PED16
Fire strategies and design must account for and incorporate this human behavior. Human behavior is complex and multi-faceted and requires a reduction in uncertainties. If the designed building can show a validated and verifiable fire strategy that takes into account a level of predictable human behavior, the possibilities for improved performance based fire design in…
After 15 years….
Its been about 15 years since the events of September 11th. I remember the day very clearly still. Reflecting on how much has changed since that day in society and our built environment is staggering. While visiting NIST this summer I had the opportunity to do some of this reflection. Largely a lot of the…
Reflecting on a Real Hotel Evacuation near Washington
We visited NIST last week to discuss human behavior in fire and structural testing on steel structures (ill post later on those stories...). The agenda was quite simple arrive August 16th in the evening, attend a one day visit and return August 18th. On August 17th at approximately 2 am I was awoken by loud banging…
The MGM Grand Fire
The MGM Grand Fire occurred on November 21st 1980. It represents a significant case study in the study of Human Behavior in fire as well as for smoke dynamics. About 87 people were killed in this fire. Recently I had a chance to visit and talk to certain staff members at the current building over…
The Strength of Lego
Had an absolute grand time crushing Legos with Hailey Todd and the virtual ventures summer camp at Carleton University this week. Thought Id pass on some of the results we observed. Unlike the previous study conducted for the BBC where only one Lego block type was tested, we really wanted to understand what happens with Lego under a realistic building configurations…
United Kingdom Fire Expedition 2016
The research team recently traveled to the United Kingdom. Students (three of them + one former) presented 4 papers with me. Their work was on aging populations, engineered timber, concrete structures after fire, and advancing our knowledge in fibre reinforced polymer constructions at the Interflam conference. All the papers were well received. Our human behavior…
Canadian Engineering Education Association’s Annual Conference
We traveled to Halifax to take part in the Canadian Engineering Education Conference. At the conference we presented a study titled Fire Safety Engineering Education using Experiential Learning by myself and student authors Lauren Folk and Claudia Gaudreault. The presentation described successes of the re-launch of our human behavior in Fires course at Carleton University last Spring. Of emphasis is…
YorkU Fire Research Team 