Summary
Francesca is a PhD student in the research group Imperial Hazelab lead by Prof. Guillermo Rein within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is currently studying how building facades behave in fire and how to design safer facade systems. Her research project is funded by Arup and EPSRC.
She holds a BEng in Structural Engineering and Architecture from the University of Edinburgh, and an MSc in Advanced Structural Engineering from Imperial College London. During her masters, she worked on defining a heat transfer methodology for structural steel cables subject to fire using a combination of theoretical and computational simulations.
Francesca was awarded a student research grant from the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) Foundation in 2020 worth $5000. The grant will be used to partially fund large-scale experiments that will be part of her PhD thesis. Francesca is the current president for the SFPE London student chapter, role she has been covering since January 2020 and has presented her work at the SFPE Europen conference in 2019 and 2021.
Publications
Journals
Lugaresi F, Sedlak B, Kotsovinos P, et al., 2023, Thermal response of a curtain wall framing system under fire conditions, Fire Safety Journal, Vol:140, ISSN:0379-7112
Lugaresi F, Kotsovinos P, Lenk P, et al., 2022, Review of the mechanical failure of non-combustible facade systems in fire, Construction and Building Materials, Vol:361, ISSN:0950-0618
Kotsovinos P, Atalioti A, Rein G, et al., 2020, Analysis of the thermomechanical response of structural cables subject to fire, Fire Technology, Vol:56, ISSN:0015-2684, Pages:515-543