FSEG News

These pages contain NEWS concerning FSEG activities.

Under RESEARCH NEWS can be found information concerning FSEG achievements, staff news, new FSEG projects and new developments within FSEG.

Under SOFTWARE NEWS can be found the latest information concerning the entire range of FSEG software products.

• Research News
• Software News
• Press Releases
• News Archive
• Press Release Archive

Research News

This section lists all news concerning FSEG staff and their research activities.

[11/11/24] FSEG and CSRPS welcome Prof Aoife Hunt to the team

We are delighted to welcome Aoife Hunt MBE as Professor of Crowd Safety and Security serving on the leadership team for M³4Impact. This ambitious new project, funded by Research England (Expanding Excellence in England (E3) fund), brings together and expands world-leading research from the Centre for Safety, Resilience and Protective Security (CSRPS) (incorporating FSEG) and the Computational Science and Engineering Group (CSEG) at the University of Greenwich to address some of the most complex and high-priority research challenges of our time.

Aoife will have a critical role in driving business development and building partnerships with industry, government, and academia. She will also continue to lead high-impact research and innovation addressing protective security challenges, and, more generally, fast-track growth in multi-disciplinary and multi-scale modelling across the M³4Impact research themes.

Aoife is a leading specialist in people movement, crowd dynamics and emergency evacuation strategies. She has over 15 years’ experience in simulating human behaviour and pedestrian dynamics, and has led high profile projects across the globe, advising on all aspects of people movement and behaviour in buildings, hospitals, stadia and events, the public realm, and transport systems.

[16/01/24] FSEG and CSRPS awarded large Research England grant for M³4Impact project

FSEG is delighted to announce that Research England has awarded the University of Greenwich just over £9 million for our research proposal, ‘Multi-Scale, Multi-disciplinary Modelling for Impact’ (M³4Impact). The grant starts in August 2024 and runs for five years.

A significant part of the proposal focused on the work of the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG), in Safety and Security. The new grant will greatly support and enhance this, taking community resilience and evacuation modelling across scales encompassing cityscapes, incorporating real-time interactivity with high fidelity fire and evacuation simulation through high performance computing coupled with VR/MR, expanding evacuation scenarios to include large-scale natural hazards such as wildfire, anthropogenic hazards and marauding armed terrorists, developing modelling of safety and security to include two-way dynamic coupling for fire and evacuation and harnessing AI to support fire and evacuation simulation.

The Research England independent assessment panel highlighted ‘how impressed they were with the excellence of the fire safety research and how important it is, in their view, that this remains the central focus of the expanded unit.’

Over the first two years of the grant, we intend to significantly expand our research effort and research teams through the employment of 10 new full-time research staff and 17 PhD students. If you are a talented research scientist or engineer in the areas of fire or evacuation modelling, a research scientist in the area of human behaviour in evacuation, a software engineer with interest in AI, VR/MR or high performance computing, or if you are interested in undertaking a PhD in any of these areas, keep an eye on the FSEG web pages (https://fseg.gre.ac.uk/fire/positions.html) as we will be recruiting soon.

More information can be found on the FSEG web pages at: https://fseg.gre.ac.uk/fire/M3ForImpact.html

[16/05/22] FSEG welcome new PhD student Timothy Crow to the team

FSEG welcomed a new PhD research student, Timothy Crow, to the SMARTFIRE team. Using the SMARTFIRE CFD fire simulation software, Tim’s project will investigate issues affecting the spread of fire over external cladding systems in high-rise buildings and approaches to reduce the impact of such fires.

[04/09/19] FSEG in collaboration with Multiplex and funding from IOSH, has completed a unique study into the evacuation of high-rise construction sites

The study involved four unannounced full-scale evacuation trials using two different high-rise construction sites, a series of five controlled evacuation experiments on construction sites and some 1900 computer simulations of high-rise construction site evacuation.

The project had six aims and objectives, the most important being to:

• develop an evidence base characterising, for the first time, the evacuation behaviour and performance of construction workers, including response times and movement rates on temporary floor surfaces (decking and decking with rebar), temporary scaffold stairs and ladders
• provide evacuation data that could be used to validate evacuation models, specific to construction sites
• demonstrate how evacuation procedures for construction sites can be optimised, through the use of evacuation modelling, utilising data collected in this project

A summary of the project findings and a link to the full report and collected data can be found below.

• The full report can be downloaded from: www.iosh.com/constructionevacuation
• Construction site evacuation simulation videos can be found on the FSEG YOUTUBE Channel at: https://www.youtube.com/user/FSEGresearch
• The High-Rise Construction Site Evacuation Modelling Validation Data-Set can be downloaded from: http://fseg.gre.ac.uk/validation/building_evacuation/
• A project overview can be found at: http://fseg.gre.ac.uk/fire/construction_sites123.html

[21/05/15] FSEG PhD student wins inaugural SFPE Guylene Proulx Scholarship

Robert Brown, FSEG PhD student (member of staff at Memorial University Canada) has been awarded the SFPE Foundation first annual Dr. Guylène Proulx, OC Scholarship. This award was established in 2014 in honour of Dr. Guylène Proulx, an outstanding researcher in human factors and human behaviour related to fire, and a passionate advocate for fire safety awareness. The grant will go towards funding Mr. Brown’s PhD project entitled “Collection, Analysis and Implementation of Human Performance Data from Planned Assembly Trials on Passenger Ships at Sea.” Rob’s PhD is based on work FSEG undertook as part of the EU FP7 SAFEGUARD project.

More information can be found in the UoG press release and the SFPE press release.

[30/05/14] FSEG win Medal of Distinction from The Royal Institution of Naval Architects

Robert Brown, Prof Ed Galea, Dr Steven Deere and Mr Lazaros Filippidis from FSEG have won the 2014 Medal of Distinction from the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (RINA). The award is made for the best paper to appear in the The Transactions of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, International Journal of Maritime Engineering in 2013. The paper was entitled:

“Passenger Response Time Data-Sets for Large Passenger Ferries and Cruise Ships Derived from Sea Trials”

The paper was published in the RINA Journal, The Transactions of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, International Journal of Maritime Engineering, Vol 155, Part A2, pp A97-A103, April-June 2013.

Prof Ed Galea accepting the award from the RINA President | The Medal of Distinction

Further photographs may be found on the FSEG Facebook pages.

[26/02/14] FSEG win The Guardian University Award for Research Impact

In acknowledgement of FSEG’s work on developing the IADSS concept and its contribution to the GETAWAY project, FSEG was awarded the prestigious Research Impact Award for 2014 as part of The Guardian University Awards. A full account of the award and the citation can be found on The Guardian web pages and photographs may be found on the FSEG Facebook pages.

The Guardian University Awards Winner 2014 | Team photograph by James Turner

Software News

This section lists latest news concerning FSEG software products.

[04/08/23] maritimeEXODUS V6.1 IS NOW AVAILABLE!

New Functionality Features (Levels A, B and C)

• Enhanced Simulation Output File Control (*.SIM).
  maritimeEXODUS now has improved options for selecting the specific data output to a simulation file (.sim). The Parameters dialogue box has been extended to enable the user complete control over all data output. In this manner, simulation data which is not required by the user can effectively be turned off, thereby resulting in simulation files which show only the information needed by the user. This also has the advantage of potentially reducing the size of simulation output files, resulting in them taking up less hard drive space.

A number of previously reported software bugs have also addressed in the V6.1 release.

[31/05/2017] buildingEXODUS v6.3 IS NOW AVAILABLE!

New Functionality Features (Levels A, B and C)

• Saving geometry boundaries as CAD DXF files.
  buildingEXODUS now has the ability to save the boundaries of specific floors as CAD DXF files. Each floor can be saved in a format which enables it to be imported into third party software (i.e. CFD fire modelling software, 3D visualisation software etc.).

User interface (Levels A, B and C):

• Updated Data Output Options Dialogue Box
  The format of the Data Output Options dialogue box has been updated and simplified. The output data attributes have been grouped and separated onto different tabs. Additional attributes have been included in the output list.

Hazard Model (Level C Only)

There are a number of improvements to the Hazard model:

• Updated HCN Model
  The toxicity model defining the effect of HCN on agents within EXODUS has been updated in order to ensure compatibility with the most recent version presented in the SFPE Handbook, 5th Edition.

• Updated Default VCO2*RMV Cap
  The cap on VCO2*RMV has been decreased to 70 lit/min.

• Updated the Default PID Distribution (FICO equation)
  There are three options available for setting the PID:

  • SFPE PID (Distribution) – Default Option: PID assigned from the distribution defined within the SFPE Handbook (5th Edition) – values between 5% and 45%.
  • Fixed Value PID: Each member of the population is assigned the same single value for PID. The default value is 30% COHb.
  • User Defined PID: PID determined by the user. This requires the user to populate a distribution table similar to that in option 1.

• New Irritant Model Parameter, Tolerance Factor (TF)
  The TF attribute is a measure of the concentration of irritant gas (ppm) required to cause a given endpoint and is used in the FIC model. A TF is specified for each irritant agent considered in the model e.g. TF_HCL.

• Updated Agent Irritant Tolerance Concentration Model (FIC)
  End points of escape impairment and incapacitation due to irritant concentrations can now be specified. The lower threshold of escape impairment being the new default setting. Furthermore, there are now five methods for assigning the TF, with the endpoints being either Escape Impairment or Incapacitation.

  • SFPE Escape Impaired (Distribution) – Default Option: TF randomly assigned for each irritant gas from an assumed distribution based on data defined in the SFPE Handbook for Escape Impairment.
  • SFPE Escape Impaired (Fixed): A fixed TF for each irritant gas corresponding to the SFPE Escape Impaired mean values is assigned, the same value is used for each member of the population.
  • SFPE Incapacitation (Fixed): A fixed TF for each irritant gas corresponding to the SFPE Incapacitation mean values is assigned, the same value is used for each member of the population.
  • ISO 13571 Incapacitation (Fixed): A fixed TF for each irritant gas corresponding to the ISO 13571 Incapacitation mean values is assigned, the same value is used for each member of the population.
  • User Defined: A user specified TF is used for each irritant. This can either be a fixed value, a range or a distribution.

• New Irritant Model Parameter, Critical Irritant Incapacitation Factor (CIIF)
  The CIIF is a new parameter introduced due to the introduction of the new FIC option of Escape Impairment. The CIIF attribute defines the FIC value required to cause incapacitation. When the Escape Impairment option is used CIIF = 4.5.

• New Irritant Model Parameter, Critical Dose (CD)
  The CD attribute is a measure of the dose of irritant gas (ppm.min) required to cause a given endpoint and is used in the FLD model. The endpoint is considered to be fatality, but there are three different CD values that can be used depending on the FLD model used. A CD value is required for each irritant agent considered e.g. CD_HCL.

• Updated Agent Irritant Tolerance Dose Model (FLD)
  In the new version of buildingEXODUS FLD has no impact on an agent’s ability to evacuate but can be used to assess the likelihood of the exposed agent surviving post evacuation. In the new release there are three options for assigning the CDx values.

  • SFPE FLD Critical Dose – Default Option: CD for each irritant gas is specified as in the SFPE Handbook, the same value is used for each member of the population. This is based on mean values that are likely to cause fatality in 50% of the population.
  • AEGL-3 FLD Critical Dose: CD for each irritant gas is specified from the AEGL-3 distribution specified in the SFPE Handbook, the same value is used for each member of the population.
  • User Defined FLD Critical Dose: A user specified CD is used for each irritant.

• New Heat Model Parameter, Radiant Heat Threshold (RHT)
  RHT (KW/m²) is a user defined parameter below which the FIHr is not calculated. The default value is 1.7 KW/m².

[11/11/2013] SMARTFIRE v4.3 IS NOW AVAILABLE!

The release of SMARTFIRE V4.3 incorporated several significant additions to the SMARTFIRE CFD engine.

VERSION 4.3 MODIFICATIONS

• Multiple-Particle-Size smoke model: New model to represent smoke as a number of independent SOOT phases – each with different particle diameters and relative proportions – allowing smoke to experience gravitational settling, which can be an important smoke transport process in large scale geometries, such as tunnels.

• Algebraic Multi-Grid solver for pressure correction: This new solver assists the solution propagation in scenarios with highly refined meshes or in difficult geometries (e.g. tunnels). Unlike traditional Multi-Grid solvers, the algebraic form does not require separately generated real meshes.

• Enhanced Fractional Effective Dose (FED) monitor points with occupant characteristics: FED monitoring now allows each probe to be characterised with occupant characteristics to give a more accurate and representative understanding of the cumulative toxicity effect of the evolving solution.