Teacher’s thoughts after the Fire simulation -course
Alltogether 14 students passed the Fire simulation -course this spring. The course was about fire and evacuation simulations, focusing on the simulation technology.
Congratulations to all our active students!
In the final project of the course, the students had to perform a fire and evacuation analysis of Aalto University’s new building, called Väre. Actually, just the part of the building which contained the lecture halls and large atrium. The project works were evaluated based on the technical aspects of the simulations, reporting quality and critical assessment of the results. The actual analysis outcomes, such as fire conditions or evacuation times, were not really evaluated, as I did not have a ‘correct answer’ to provide. Also, as we did not really cover the performance based design process in this course, the students were on pretty much on their own when making the modelling decisions.
However, I thought it would be interesting to see how the results are distributed. The figure below shows a summary of ASET vs. RSET values extracted from the students’ reports. What surprised me, was the fact that the scattering in the fire simulation results, i.e. the ASET value, was so large. OK, among the results there are some that included a clear error in fire specification. But anyway, I would have expected that the scattering would be more in the evacuation simulation results.
As a teacher, this was a very valuable exercise to me because it gives me a reference point when designing a future course about ‘Fire risk and evacuation analysis’, to be organized in fall 2017. Justification of fire scenarios, critical review of modelling decisions, and self-evaluation will become topics there.
Below some pictures of the simulation project, created by Marianna Kauriala.
