SAFE Heritage Buildings: Sustainable Assessment of Fire Engineering

Fires at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Nacional, Notre Dame de Paris, and Shuri Castle in Japan in 2019 have shed light on the inadequacy of modern fire safety regulations in heritage sites around the globe. They have stressed the complexity of adapting cutting-edge technologies to historic buildings. Modern fire measures are typically introduced in historic buildings in a prescriptive way, even though there is evidence that some of these measures can trigger processes of decay in traditional construction and fail to limit the consequences of an accidental fire. To implement them, owners and custodians depend on fire safety experts, most of whom are unfamiliar with these unusual structures and rely on guidelines and regulations designed for constructions from the second half of the 20th century. At the root of the problem is the lack of interactions between the communities of fire scientists, historians, and curators, each holding a piece of the puzzle. 

Aiming to use an interdisciplinary approach to design new fire safety system, this project will sow the seeds of a long-term collaboration between these disciplines with the potential to have a sustained impact on fire safety in heritage sites. Building on the outcomes of the scientific investigations related to Notre Dame, this new approach will advance a scientific fire assessment methodology to quantify how traditional buildings perform in fires, benefitting from coupled modelling of fire spread and associated structural response. Taking into account the benefits of traditional material and construction techniques, and incorporating the conservation needs and priorities, appropriate, tailored fire strategies for historic buildings can then be designed. This activity will allow one student to develop his or her skills and international experience, involving him/her in site visits, data acquisition, and post-processing activities.

Area

Civil Engineering

UCL leads

• Dr Augustin Guibaud, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering