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A leading fire engineer has won a top award for her work which has been used in some of the world’s most iconic buildings. Dr Barbara Lane, associate director with consultancy Arup, has won a Royal Academy of Engineering silver medal for her outstanding contribution with a commercial benefit to British engineering.
She was presented with the medal at the Academy Awards dinner in London last week.
As technical leader of Arup Fire, 37-year old Barbara is responsible for the technical strategy driving the company’s global fire consultancy business. During her PhD research at Edinburgh University and in further collaborations with the university fire research team, she has developed the application of computer models which analyse how steel-framed structures behave during fires.
“Traditionally fire was not seen as a structural issue,” she said. “If you put fire-proof cladding on the steel to keep it cool, it was deemed no longer to be a problem. However, the cladding often fell off if it wasn’t properly maintained. What we found was that the heat of a fire fundamentally changes and weakens the structure and you need to account for that at the design stage, as you would for the effects of snow, wind or earthquakes. By contemplating structural fire response in this way, a more robust structural design can be created.”
For some new projects Dr Lane’s work has enabled designers to use half the amount of passive fire protection than they would conventionally have used on a steel frame, by designing the structure itself from the start to be intrinsically more fire-resistant.