Presented by Egle Rackauskaite
Abstract
Traditional design fires for structures are based on experimental compartments smaller than 100 m2 in floor area which has led to the inherent assumption of flashover in these design fires. However, modern buildings often have much larger open-plan floor areas where non-uniform fire conditions are likely to occur. This talk will cover 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.
Bio
Egle Rackauskaite is a Fire Engineer at Arup, based in London, where she specializes in structural fire safety of steel, concrete, and timber structures. In 2017, Rackauskaite has completed a PhD at Imperial College London, focusing on the study of travelling fire dynamics in large enclosures, and the response of structures to fires. Rackauskaite has experience in providing expert fire safety and structural fire engineering advice on a range of different project types in the UK, the development of large-scale compartment fire experiments, and modelling structures in fire using nonlinear finite element analysis.