PECM Issue 21 2016 | Page 65

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.