Highlights

Francesca was awarded a 2020 Research Grant from the SFPE Foundation for large-scale fire experiments in collaboration with ITB Poland. These experiments will investigate the mechanical performance of curtain wall facades exposed to fire. (The picture was taken during the 2019 SFPE European conference in Malaga; we are looking forward to future SFPE conferences!)

x-ONE Paper Published

A very important paper led by Hazelab was finally published. The paper reports observations from a large-scale fire experiment x-ONE conducted in Poland in 2017. The objective of x-ONE was to capture experimentally a natural fire inside a large and open plan compartment. With an open-plan floor area of 380 m², x-ONE is the largest compartment fire experiment carried out to date! The paper will be available on the 1st of October 2021.

Adapting to Remote Learning

During the pandemic, our team created and run a home experiment for the heat transfer laboratory session for second-year mechanical engineering students. The 168 heat transfer kits were assembled by Harry in his home office!

More about the lab

Hazelab Artbook by Dwi

During the pandemic, Dwi created artistic images of Hazelab members by modifying photos in very creative ways. The images are inspired by our individual work and have been collected in an artbook. They are really really cool, thanks Dwi

Check out the Artbook!

Francesca wins the 2021 PhD Summer Showcase

Francesca was awarded the first prize at the 2021 PhD Summer Showcase. The competition is organized by the Graduate School every year to celebrate the research being carried out by the College’s PhD students. Francesca submitted a 3-minute video entitled "Fire Safety of Glass Facades" and won over the jury with her lovely illustrations. Well done!

Watch the video!

Review of emissions from smouldering peat fires

Hazelab’s 2018 review paper on smoke emissions from smouldering wildfires has been selected for the Special Issue in International Journal of Wildland Fire in celebration of the journal’s 30th anniversary. The paper was selected as one of the top 15 reviews published in the past 12 years (more than 700 papers!)

Read the paper

IAFSS Awards !

Guillermo was awarded the FORUM Mid-Career Researcher Award, which recognizes exceptional achievement and demonstrated leadership in the fields of fire safety science.
Francesco Restuccia, Hazelab alumni, was awarded the honorable mention for Best Thesis for the thesis titled Self-heating ignition of natural reactive porous media conferred by Imperial College. While Xinyan Huang, also Hazelab alumni, was awarded the 2020 Early Career Proulx Award.
Congratulations to all!

Matt's EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award

Matt has been awarded a grant for the purpose of facilitating the application of his research to the real world, benefiting society at large. He will be developing an algorithm to estimate the heat release rate of a turbulent fire using ordinary video footage. Very Exciting!

2021 Fellow of The Combustion Institute

Guillermo has been named Fellow of The Combustion Institute. The selection committee elected exceptional honorees, each Fellow has made outstanding contributions to the discipline of combustion science in research or in application. This is a lifetime honorific title, congratulations G !!

Check the full list of Fellows

‘Magical’ fire suppressant

Research by Agung shows that an environmentally friendly fire suppressant, when combined with water, cuts the amount of time and water needed to extinguish peat fires by 40%. This could be critical in ending pollution-related deaths, devastation of local communities, and environmental damage caused by these fires. Want to know more?

Read the press release!

El-Shanawany Memorial Prize

Eirik was awarded the Dr Ashraf Ben El-Shanawany Memorial Prize! Dr El Shanawany was an Engineering Doctorate student at Imperial College, who died in 2017, shortly after finishing his thesis entitled Uncertainty Quantification in Probabilistic Safety Analysis. The prize is awarded for outstanding achievement in research, public outreach, and innovation with focus on safety. We are proud of Eirik and honoured for this medal.

Zombie Fires

Dwi's latest paper about modeling large smoldering fires with cellula automata was the focus of a science article on Wired! Guillermo was interviewed anout the model and discussed the problem of smoldering zombie fires in tropical and artic regions.

Read the Article on Wired

Flash Points submissions

Hazelab submitted eight videos to the Flash Points communication competition organized by the SFPE London student chapter. Francesca and Matt won an award for outstanding video from the committee! Congrats to Dwi, Agung, Simona, Eirik, Harry and Xuanze, all videos were great!

Watch the videos

Evacuation from Wildfires grant

Imperial Hazelab is part of three research grants recently won to simulate the evacuation from wildfires. Funders are NIST in USA, Royal Academy of Engineering (Safer Complex Systems) in the UK and NRC in Canada. In the context of the ferocious wildfires in the West Coast, especially in California and Oregon, and when 500 thousand people have been evacuated from their homes, a computational tool that allows for better and faster evacuations is essential. This is a collaboration with University of Lund (Sweden), Movement Strategies (UK), RMIT (Australia), NRC (Canada) and NFPA (USA).

Battery Fires

According to a new review paper by our battery fire research team, battery safety standards do not represent real-world scenarios that could cause fires and are therefore not robust enough to prevent, detect, and suppress battery fires. They believe that fire safety issues with lithium-ion batteries could be addressed with better collaboration across sectors.

Go to the press release

Friends of Imperial Webinar

Guillermo was invited to give a talk to Friends of Imperial, a charity which advances education for the public by giving access to extraordinary developments and discoveries taking place at Imperial College London. He explained how science contributes to reduce the worldwide burden of accidental fires and argues that not all fires are bad.

Watch the Recording

The Research Excellence Award

Guillermo received the Research Excellence Award from The Combustion Institute for having published research papers that have had a major impact on the field of combustion science. We are very proud!

SFPE Award for Chapter Excellence

The SFPE Greater London Student Chapter was awarded the silver medal for their outstanding achievement in 2019, their first year as a SFPE chapter.

Visit the chapter's website!

The SFPE Student Scholar Award

Matthew Bonner was awarded the 2020 SFPE student scholar award for his excellent research on facade fires. Congratulation!

Hazelab on National Geographic

Hazelab was featured in an article on British Wildfire on National Geographic. Dream come true.

Check out the article

Cladding research cited on the Financial Times

Research carried out by Hazelab in collaboration with ITB in Poland was cited in an article of the Financial Times and featured on the front page! The research found HPL and ACP+FR to be the most flammable categories of cladding panels assessed. The study was led by PhD student Matthew Bonner.

Read the article

Francesco Outstanding Reviewer 2020

Francesco was awarded the Jack Watts Award for being an outstanding reviewer for Fire Technology. Good Job!!

The Great Exhibition Road Festival 2019

Hazelab participated in the 2019 edition of Exhibition Road Festival which brings together Imperial College, the V&A, Science and Natural history Museums. At our stand, we show some of the exciting research that we do and how it benefits society in the shape of technology.

Visit the Festival

Guillermo receives Arthur B Guise Medal

Guillermo was awarded the 2018 Arthur B Guise medal by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. The medal is assigned to an individual for eminent achievement in the advancement of the science and technology of fire protection engineering. Guillermo was rewarded for his work in the area of research, innovation and education

The Great Fired-Up of London

Imperial College hosted Fired-up following the event’s success at the University of Edinburgh in 2018. The event is a chance for young, UK based fire researches to meet up and discuss their work in a more informal setting than a traditional conference. A total of 40 students from 4 different UK universities attended the conference. We are looking forward to the 2020 edition!

Imperial College London

Imperial Alert

Coronavirus (COVID-19) updates: Safety information for academic year 2021-22

Hazelab