Fire and Evacuation Technical Conference (FEMTC) 2016

Great participation to the 3rd Fire and Evacuation Technical Conference (FEMTC) held these days in Malaga by Thunderhead Engineering. A wide range of topics belonging to Advanced Modelling of Humans and Fire.

More tan 100 attendees coming from all over the world, presenting case studies and innovations in the field. Extremely interesting and somehow revolutionary the approach shown by Marcos Vanella from Washington University to model complex curved geometry in FDS within the current structured grids though the Immersed Boundary Methods. On the same topic Susanne Kilian from hhpberlin shown various options of Unstructured Poisson Solvers for FDS, showing the roadmap for future development.

My presentation, made together with Jimmy Jönsson, was about the role of advanced modelling into the overall performance based design process. In the presentation I have shown 4 cases studies where advanced modelling was an essential part of the design process:


· The Adolfo Suarez Madrid-Barajas Airport

· The Turin Porta Susa train Station

· A very large logistic centre

· A heritage high rise apartment hotel.


I ended the presentation remarking how important is to use understand the role of modelling into the overall project since buildings have been design for centuries and only a few decades ago there were no models at all.

PBD process (from the SFPE Guidelines to Performance based Design)

The model selection flowchart (from SFPE Guidelines for Substantiating a Fire Model for a Given Application) 

The Adolfo Suarez Madrid-Barajas Airport

Evacuation Modelling for the high rise Apartment Hotel 

Evacuation of the Turin Porta Susa Station 

Example of the Logistic Centre