School of the Built Environment

Welcome

With a prominent long established national and international research profile, FireSERT is a significant constituent of the Built Environment Research Institute. Staff at FireSERT were awarded a £5.5 million JIF project in 1999 to build and equip a purpose designed environmentally-friendly, large-scale fire safety engineering research facility.

The facilities developed for undertaking research in this area are exceptional, a 600m2 burn hall allows full-scale fire research to be undertaken. A 20 MW facility, a large-scale combination wall and floor furnace (3m x 3m x 4m long), intermediate and small size furnaces facilitate investigations over a wide range of scales. These facilities are complemented by a well equipped fire dynamics and chemistry laboratory furnished with TGA/FTIR/DSC/MS and two cone calorimeters, one standard and one having a controlled oxidizer atmosphere. In addition to the experimental laboratories, extensive dedicated computer facilities are available for fire modelling, using CFD. A specific set of laboratories are also available for the investigation of human behaviour in fire, allowing fundamental work to be undertaken on human responses to fire and evacuation simulations.