Between the 21st and 27th of October 2023, FRISSBE senior researcher Dr Andrea Lucherini and PhD student Martin Veit attended the 14th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) in Tsukuba, Japan. Since its formation in 1985, the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) has organized the international symposium every three years, trying to share knowledge and networking among the fire safety science and engineering community. Over its full week duration, the symposium was composed of workshops, plenary lectures and breakout sessions, and it gathered more than 500 experts to discuss the latest developments, results and insights of recent research in the field of fire safety science and engineering.

On the first two days, various workshops on compartment fires, fire engineering education, façade fires, battery fires, timber fire safety, performance-based fire safety and more topics were organised and had large audience. On the first day, Dr Andrea Lucherini gave a talk entitled “Compartment fires: the emerging challenges in compartment fire research and its use in fire safety engineering”, as part of the sub-theme 3 “Emerging hazards and it influence on compartment fire dynamics”.

Dr Andrea Lucherini further gave a presentation based on the paper “Defining the fire decay and the cooling phase of post-flashover compartment fires”, co-authored by Professor José L. Torero from University College London, United Kingdom. The scientific article emphasises the main characteristics of the fire decay and cooling phase of post-flashover compartment fires, and it is published in the Fire Safety Journal: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2023.103965.

Martin Veit presented his work on Monte-Carlo simulations in the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) using Python in the poster session on the 25th of October. The poster discussed the research methodology, along with a case study where the computational time of FDS simulations is estimated using Machine Learning.