The buildings we live and work in all represent a kind of compromise. We want them to be attractive, comfortable, cost-effective, and energy efficient, but we also want them to be safe. Sometimes those objectives can come into conflict.
Faculty members in WPI’s world-renowned Department of Fire Protection Engineering are recognized experts on a wide range of issues related to fire safety in the built environment. Their research and scholarship has focused on such topics as the fire characteristics of the materials we use to make buildings, the practices we follow to design them, the creation of codes and regulations that guide building fire safety, and the actual performance of buildings in fires.
Selected Areas of Expertise:
- Laboratory studies of the fire properties of materials
- Risk-informed performance-based fire protection design
- Design and evaluation of active and passive fire protection systems
- Compartment fire dynamics
- Human behavior in fire and emergency evacuation
- Fire risk and building regulatory policy and performance fire codes
- Post-earthquake fire performance
- Fire hazards of green and sustainable building materials and practices
