Registration fees for the 12th IAFSS

Registration for the 12th IAFSS symposium will open in the beginning of February 2017. However, the registation fees are now official. Early bird prices (registration before April 19) are (exl. VAT): 6000 SEK (Swedish krona) for IAFSS members, 7200 SEK for non-members and 3500 SEK for students.

More information is available on the symposium webpage.

Lund University, Main Building

Nominate for the IAFSS Proulx and Magnusson Early Career Awards

The International Association of Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) is launching two new awards, the Proulx and Magnusson Early Career Awards. These two awards are to be presented for the first time at the 12th Symposium in Lund, Sweden in June 2017.

The Proulx and Magnusson Early Career Awards recognise meritorious achievement by members of the IAFSS who are early in their careers and have contributed a body of work that is of significance to any area of fire safety science. The two awards are distinguished by the period of time from completion of the candidates’ most recent educational degree (Ph.D., M.Sc.).

Eligibility to the Proulx Early Career Award

For the Proulx Award, candidates must be within five years from completion of their most recent degree at the time of nomination (i.e., Oct 15, 2016). The award commemorates Dr. Guylene Proulx (1960-2009), an expert in human behaviour in fire at National Research Council Canada, and IAFSS Board member at the time she passed away.

Eligibility to the Magnusson Early Career Award

For the Magnusson Award, candidates must be within five to ten years from completion of their most recent degree at the time of nomination (i.e., Oct 15, 2016). The award commemorates Prof. Sven Erik Magnusson (1938-2014), pioneer of parametric fires and risk management at Lund University, Sweden. He was one of the driving forces during the start-up of IAFSS educational committee by drafting the first education curriculum for fire safety engineering.

Privileges of the recipient

Each of the awards consists of a grant of US$4000, a plaque, and free registration for the Symposium.

Each recipient will deliver at the Symposium a review paper drawn from his/her body of work. Each recipient will be asked to prepare a paper, as per submission guidelines of the Symposium (an exceptional extension to the submission date will be granted for these papers). Papers will undergo peer review and if accepted will be presented during breakout sessions and included in the Symposium proceedings.

Selection Process

The awards will be administered together with all other IAFSS awards. The Awards Committee will nominate a Chair for Proulx and Magnusson Early Career Awards who will call upon three co‐Chairs (one representing each region). For each eligible candidate, the Chair and co‐Chairs will request at least one independent review by a subject matter expert. Chair and co‐chairs will rank submissions based on their own assessment and the views provided by the independent reviewers.

Normally, one Proulx award and one Magnusson award shall be made at each symposium; however, fewer awards will be made, if in the opinion of the committee, candidates of sufficient merit have not been proposed. The awards shall be presented at the IAFSS Symposium.

The four criteria used to select the recipient include:

  • Pertinence: Are the subject matters of the body of work within the scope of the science and engineering of fire safety?
  • Quality: Are the methodologies applied in the body of work sound and correct?
  • Significance: Do the results of the body of work add to our knowledge? Were the results new, accurate, useful and important?
  • Impact: Do the results of the body of work have a broad impact in the science and engineering of fire safety?

 Important Dates

  • September 15, 2016                  Period for nominations opens.
  • October 15, 2016                       Period for nominations ends (at midnight, UK time).
  • December 15, 2016                   Recipients will be contacted
  • February 15, 2017                     Deadline for submission of the review paper.

Nomination process

Nominations must be made by an IAFSS member in good standing. Self-nominations will be considered too. During the period for nominations, the following documents should be submitted by email to the Chairman for Proulx and Magnusson Early Career Awards:

Dr Guillermo Rein, Imperial College London, UK, [email protected]

  • Cover letter stating why the candidate is worthy of the award. This letter must also show that the candidate is eligible for the award based on the period of time from most recent. Letter must not exceed 2 pages.
  • Curriculum Vitae of the candidate (excluding publication list).
  • List of publications of the candidate. The list should be comprised of accepted journal articles and accepted conference publications. Publications submitted or in preparation or draft should not be listed.
  • Recommendation letters, no more than two pages in length each, from two experts of international standing in the field. No more than two letters from experts will be accepted.

New Guidelines for IAFSS Conference Sponsorship

The executive committee of the IAFSS has developed a new set of  guidelines for sponsorship of conferences based on many recent inquiries. These guidelines are intended to provide an indication of the level of support the IAFSS may be prepared to offer appropriate conferences in fire safety science.  The following three types of conferences are included in the guideline are:

1. Conferences organized by our sister organization AOSFST or conferences at regional level

2. Other conferences – Level 1

3. Other conferences – Level 2

Where “Other conferences – Level 1” include conferences where, among other things, peer-reviewed full papers are presented and “Other conferences – Level 2” include conferences that do not fullfil the Level 1 requirements but that still have a high scientific level and is not solely commercial. For a complete description of the different levels, please download the guideline. It must be noted that compliance with the guidelines does not necessarily mean that support will be granted. The final decision as to which conferences will be supported and the level of support that will be provided will be made by the IAFSS management committee.

Remember, regardless of sponsorship the IAFSS posts all relevant conferences to its upcoming events list. If you have a conference you think would be of interest to the IAFSS for the events list, please contact the webmaster. For inquiries regarding sponsorship, please contact the IAFSS Chairman.

Short review: 2nd European Symposium of Fire Safety Science

The 2nd European Symposium of Fire Safety Science (ESFSS) was held June 15-18 at the European University of Cyprus in Nicosia, Cyprus. More than 70 posters were presented and discussed during five different sessions throughout the three-day symposium. Each session was opened with a keynote lecture by an invited speaker. The five topics and speakers were:

poster esfss
Poster award winner Xinyan Huang (Imperial College, London) presents his peat fire research to conference participants.
  1. Fire Hazards with New Energy Carriers  –  Guy Marlair (INERIS)
  2. Fire Extinguishment in Large Facilities –  Bert Yu (FM Global)
  3. Fire Research for the Fire Service  –  Stefan Svensson (Lund University)
  4. Forest Fire Research  –  Domingos Viegas (University of Coimbra)
  5. Probabilistic Structural Fire Engineering  –  Luke Bisby (The University of Edinburgh)

Posters related to each topic were displayed after the keynotes, followed by an open discussion led by the keynote speakers. Both the open discussion and poster session made it possible to discuss the current state of the topic and on-going research in each topical area. Also, the poster presenters received valuable comments on their research from scholars that had come from around the world to Cyprus. The majority of the around 80 participants were from Europe but there were also participants coming from Australia, Canada, China, Egypt and the USA.

The IAFSS contributed with three poster awards that were handed out after the final poster session at the symposium. The competition was tough because the overall quality of the posters was high. The awards committee did however finally decide on the following three winners:

  • Xinyan Hugan (Imperial Collage): ‘Smouldering Peat Fires’
  • Juan P. Hidalgo (The University of Edinburgh): ‘Thermal Barriers for Combustible Insulation Materials’
  • Jorge Raposo (University of Coimbra): ‘Fuel Spread Across a Fuel Break on a Ridge’

The IAFSS would like to congratulate the  winners and thank everyone that submitted and presented posters at ESFSS! The IAFSS would also like to thank the organisation committee and especially George Boustras (European University of Cyprus) and Bart Merci (Gent University) for a very well organised and inspiring symposium.

The titles of all the presented posters can be found here: http://2ndesfss.com/

Save the date: 12th IAFSS Symposium

Lund University, Main BuildingThe International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) is proud to announce that the 12th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science will be held June 12-16, 2017 at Lund University, Sweden.

The IAFSS Symposium is the premier fire safety science meeting in the world and has been organized triennially since 1985. The program will have parallel sessions for the presentation of fully peer-reviewed papers over the five days of the Symposium, including invited lectures from the world’s top fire science researchers. The Symposium will also have poster sessions which will provide an excellent opportunity to interact individually with researchers about their most recent work. The planning of the Symposium is well under way and there are plans on both technical and social activities (workshops, student sessions, etc.) during the days before and after the Symposium. There will also be a wide range of entertainment and tours in the companion program. Southern Sweden bosts both rural and urban areas as well as a marvellous nature within a well accessible area. More information about the different arrangements will be presented as the planning of the Symposium progresses.

The Symposium will be held on the Lund University Campus. Lund University is a world-class university and it is ranked as one of the top 100 Universities in the world. The city of Lund was founded around year 990 and in 1085 the first school was founded in the city, which makes Lund the oldest seat of learning in Northern Europe. Lund University was first officially found in 1666 and today it has well over 42.000 students enrolled, courses and educational programs are given in most conceivable disciplines. There has been active and well-known research in fire science at the faculty of engineering since the 1960s. The Department of Fire Safety Engineering is involved in both bachelor and master programs in Fire Safety Engineering with a yearly enrollment of around 70 new students in these programs.

The city center is accessible due to its small size, which makes it easy to travel both by foot and the well developed public transport system. There are also very good connections with the rest of the region and the world. The international airport in Copenhagen is only 30 minutes away by train. Copenhagen airport is the largest airport in Scandinavia and easy to reach from most major international airports.

The IAFSS are convinced that the 12th Symposium will be a very successful event and we hope to see you in Lund in June 2017!

IAFSS Proceedings indexed by Google Scholar

IAFSS_ProceedingsThe papers hosted in our publication archive have been included in some databases such as Microsoft Academic for some time, but now they are also included in Google Scholar. Citations to the publications in Google Scholar works well and many of the older IAFSS papers are showing hundreds of citations.  These papers include proceedings from the past 11 IAFSS Symposia, Fire Research Notes from the UK Fire Research Station (FRS) and the first seven Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (AOSFST).

The inclusion of our publications in Google Scholar will increase the visibility of our large repository of open access fire safety science research, increasing citations for our members and making it easier to find related works for the whole community. Our publications have already been indexed with digital object identifiers (DOI) and included in the Crossref database for some time, facilitating citation tracking through a number of other databases.

We would like to thank Terry Fay of Jensen Hughes for the technical edits which facilitated our archive’s recent inclusion. Note that Google Scholar indexes our papers using their “robots” or “crawlers”, so we do not control how publications are represented once indexed. If you have questions about specific articles, please contact [email protected] and we will do our best to resolve any issues.

New teaching resources available

enclosure fire dynamics coverDr. Björn Karlsson has share his teaching material which is based on the textbook Enclosure Fire Dynamics (EFD) and it is now accessible through the IAFSS website. Dr. Karlsson, Dr. Quintiere and former colleagues to Dr. Karlsson at Lund University have, over more than a decade, developed a lot of teaching material used to accompany the textbook. The teaching material includes: PowerPoint presentations, reading instructions, overview of each chapter in EFD, homework assignments and two descriptions of possible laboratories

The IAFSS are very glad that Dr. Karlsson has shared this material and that it now can be freely accessed from the Educational resources page.

 

 

Obituary: Sven Erik Magnusson

Professor Emeritus Sven Erik Magnusson passed away on December 15 2014, leaving family, friends and colleagues in sorrow and grief. Professor Magnusson has been invaluable in the development of both research and education in fire science, fire safety engineering and risk management and societal safety at Lund University.

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In the fire science world he will be remembered as a pioneer and visionary in the area of parametric fires and for the introduction of risk management for fire safety design. Related to fire engineering education he will be remembered as one of the authors of the first curriculum for fire safety engineering published in the Fire Safety Journal in 1995.  Together with the late Prof. em. Ove Petterson he was one of the driving forces during the start-up of the IAFSS (International Association of Fire Safety Science). He was a principal figure in the start-up of the MSc program in Risk Management and Safety Engineering at Lund University and in initiating and leading Lund University Centre for Risk Assessment and Management (LUCRAM) together with Prof. Roland Akselsson.

Prof. Sven Erik Magnusson was born on January 3rd 1938 and he grew up near Lönsboda, in the northeast part of Skåne. He started his university career as PhD student with Prof. Ove Pettersson and defended his PhD thesis in a joint session with Prof. em. Sven Thelandersson. Together they had 3 opponents for the discussion forum. The work of Magnusson and Thelandersson was later used as the basis for parametric fires in the Eurocodes and was considered a pioneering work. He was also active as a researcher in the area of fire development where he was involved in a number of research projects dealing with early room fires in cooperation with SP in Borås. In the start up phase of standardisation of the room corner test, he was chairman of the working group on ISO TC92 SC1.  After the retirement of Prof. Ove Petterson, he was appointed professor at the Department of Fire Safety Engineering. In the beginning of his academic career he became heavily involved in the development of courses for the BSc program in fire protection engineering, together with Robert Jönsson and the staff at the department of fire safety engineering.

In the mid-nineties the focus of his research moved to the area of risk management and societal safety. He started activities such as LUCRAM and introduced multidisciplinary research in the department. Around the same time, he initiated and led the development of the MSc program in Risk Management and Safety Engineering. Furthermore, he led numerous research activities in this area that generated continuous growth of risk-related research at the university. At the end of his career, he always supported the younger generation by leading the development of larger research projects and serving as a mentor for many of the PhD students in risk research.

After his retirement, he still kept close links with the late Prof. Philip Thomas, also a founding member of the IAFSS, and felt a deep sorrow when Philip passed away earlier in 2014.

In addition to being a distinguished academic, Sven Erik was very interested in society and was keen on keeping up with current affairs as well as understanding history. His cultural interests included theatre and classical music, and he was keen on exercising not only the mind but also the body, mainly through spinning classes. He was very passionate about spending time in his country house with his closest family, his beloved wife Lisbeth, their children and grandchildren, and friends.

We will remember Sven Erik as a great researcher as well as a warm and caring person whom many of us have to thank for very much today. Many friends and colleagues from across the world will sadly miss Sven Erik.

Signed: Marcus Abrahamson and Patrick van Hees, with help from Lisbeth, Sven Eriks’ wife