Two days of Fire Safety Design presentations

Over the Tuesday and Wednesday this week, our Fire and Explosion Engineering MSc Students stood behind the lecture podium and presented the technical case in support  of their proposed fire safety strategy for their selected building, to an academic panel and to their colleagues,  and answered probing questions on their proposals.

After attending one teaching week on Fire Safety Design in November (with many contributions and guidance from industry leaders), the students selected a building/structure (of sufficient complexity to require an engineered solution)  for their  Fire Safety Design project.  Apart from the 20 minute presentation of their design highlights the Students have to submit a fully documented report  covering ALL aspects of the fire safety strategy (means of escape, fire spread control, smoke management, suppression etc).  

The types of buildings, covered this week, was wide-ranging and included hospitals, shopping malls, high rise residential towers, industrial complexes. Some examples were:

• The new Royal Liverpool Hospital,
• The Barnstead CO2 Pumping Station (part of future large scale CO2 capture scheme),
• A Lubricants Storage Depot in Casambanca
• A Worker's Hospital and Integrated Health Center in the Qatar Desert
• Zagreb Airport Terminal 2.
• ....plus many more

Geographically, we were taken from Ireland to deep Siberia, down to the Gulf States, back across to North Africa and many places in-between!  

In attendance, during the presentations, were representatives of Fire Engineering consultants WSP, who are sponsors of a formal University prize for the best design project overall - awarded at the end of the year. 

At the end of each of the presentation days they also kindly offered a "best presentation of the day" award. The winners are shown below.  

The winners of the WSP  "Best Presentation" of the day awards. At the end of Day 1 Sinead Desmond receives her award from Chris Barrett while on Day 2, Marios Alexandrou is congratulated by Callum Dyer.

At the end of each day there was a  celebratory drink (also sponsored) at the Library, across the road. 

Congratulations to all the presenters for the professional and interesting presentations that we had over the two days and for reaching this important milestone in their studies.

Roth Phylaktou