Fire Science In High-Rise Timber Buildings

Innovative timber products such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) and GluLam are revolutionizing the construction industry by improving the design quality and sustainable practices in high-rise buildings globally. Timber structures have the advantage of potentially reducing carbon emissions by over 30%, but fire safety is more complex. It is therefore important to understand how fire behaves in timber structures, to inform future fire-safe timber designs. My PhD will therefore focus on unlocking timbers potential as a safe, more cost efficient and more sustainable building material by researching and modelling fire behaviour in high rise timber structures.
In collaboration with Arup, this research will mainly approach the issue by implementation of computational fire modelling (FDS). This will include building on the previous work modelling the burning of timber at a microscale, and then applying this to a macroscale in enclosed structures. The work will validate a fire model at the scale of a single room or compartment, taking into account pyrolysis, burning, radiation, turbulence and buoyancy. This is done with the aid of experimental data, new and from literature. One of the key factors is to obtain input parameters that investigate innovative "what if" scenarios that have not been explored yet, such as different configurations of CLT, and different ignition scenarios.