Other support
Arup’s Fire Engineering practice
currently co-sponsors the work of
Professor Bisby and his team, and
Arup is a principal collaborator
in the overall project. Professor
Bisby spends time each year in
Arup’s offices and Arup engineers
collaborate with Edinburgh in
both education and research
contexts, to the benefit of both
parties.
“It means that there is a massive
opportunity to optimise buildings
for fire and in many cases to make
structures lighter, more beautiful
and sustainable,” he said. Overdesign implies higher cost in
terms of initial construction and
of the building lifecycle. And
in those fewer cases where the
current codes under-estimate the
negative impacts of fire, there
may be safety issues.
Research impact
In order to be able to treat fire as
Luke Bisby’s work is redefining
to model a specific building, the
the way fire is treated in the
structural design of buildings. He
said, “Fire should be considered as
a design load in the same way that
wind, gravity, and seismic effects
are treated. Current codes for
new buildings are based on data
collated more than a century ago
and, even if they were state-of-theart then, they take little account of
the many advances since.”
The research he and his
colleagues at Edinburgh have
done so far indicates that the
current definition of a credible
worst-case design fire leads in
many cases to a significant overestimation of risk and effects
– although in some cases it
produces under-estimation.
a design load, “you need to be able
specific construction techniques,
the materials and then design
for that load”, he said. “So that
means you need computational
tools to do that and you need to
validate those computation tools
with experimental data. That is
essentially what we are doing.”
Future challenges
Biography / Career Progression
1993–1997 Undergraduate degree
in Civil Engineering and Applied
Mechanics, McGill University,
Montreal, Québec
1997–1999 Master of Science
degree in Structural Engineering,
Queen’s University, Kingston,
Ontario
1999–2003 PhD in Structural
Engineering, focusing on
structural and re performance
of polymer composite structural
strengthening materials, Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario
2003–2008 Assistant Professor
and Undergraduate Chair, Queen’s
University, Kingston, Ontario
A big challenge for the future,
Professor Bisby said, will be to
2008–2013 The Ove Arup
persuade regulators that design
Foundation/ RAEng Senior
codes and regulatory processes
Research Fellow in Structures
for sign ificant buildings should
and Fire, School of Engineering,
be changed. “Often when we try
Edinburgh University
to take an innovative approach
to re safety we come up against
2013–Present Arup /RAEng
a regulatory process that doesn’t
Research Chair in Structures
want to hear it,” he said.
and Fire, School of Engineering,
Edinburgh University
The current methodologies are a century old and the
numbers they’re based on are decades old as well. There is a
lot of inertia in practice, and we know that it will take time to
affect real and lasting change.