On Saturday 13th January 2024, the FRISSBE senior researcher Dr Andrea Lucherini was invited to give a 4-hours lecture at the 1st Level Master in Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Bolzano, Italy. His lecture entitled “Compartment fire dynamics for performance-based fire safety engineering, with special focus on the fire decay and the cooling phase” was part of the “Fire Science” course taught by Ing. Piergiacomo Cancelliere and Ing. Alberto Tinaburri.

In his lecture, Dr Lucherini presented ZAG, the FRISSBE project and the FRISSBE team and discussed the relevance of adopting holistic performance-based methodologies for the design of fire-safe buildings. These approaches aim at ensuring the stability and integrity of construction elements until complete fuel burnout and cooling. The lecture explained the traditional compartment fire framework and highlighted its shortcomings. Then, all the typical phases of a natural fire in a compartment were investigated: growth, fully-developed, decay, and cooling. The lecture particularly focused on the main characteristics of the fire decay and the cooling phase of post-flashover fires, opposed to the growth and fully-developed phases. The relevance and challenges for the main construction materials were discussed and compared. Special attention was given to the definition of the thermal boundary conditions for characterising and simulating the compartment fire dynamics for performance-based fire safety engineering.