On February 6 – 8, prof. Grunde Jomaas, ERA Chair for the FRISSBE project and Head of the Department for Fire-Safe and Sustainable Built Environment at the Slovenian National Building and Civil Engineering Institute (ZAG), visited CERN.

CERN, physics and fire safety engineering

CERN is an organisation run by 23 Member States, with many non-European countries involved in various ways. Their so-called Laboratory, established in 1954, has become a prime example of international collaboration. CERN helps uncovering what the universe is made of and how it works by providing a unique range of particle accelerator facilities to researchers in order to advance the boundaries of human knowledge. One can sum up their mission by using Grunde’s statement:

Amazing engineering to support groundbreaking physics.

Fire safety engineering is obviously also extremely important at CERN, and this requires thinking outside the box, as the challenges are vast in terms of depth, distances, travel paths, materials, fluids, gases, and so on – plenty to consider when working to ensure fire safety for humans and property alike. Finally, downtime and the loss of science have to be taken into account in the risk assessments.

FRISSBE, ZAG at CERN

Prof. Grunde Jomaas presented the research (picture on the right) carried out in the fire laboratory of the Slovenian National Building and Civil Engineering Institute.

Special thanks go to Mr. Darko Perović, fellow in fire safety engineering at CERN, for putting together a very comprehensive visit and bringing together many different fire safety experts, and to Oriol Rios, Brecht Debrouwere, Lorenzo Contini, Saverio La Mendola and Benoit Delille for hosting and good discussions.

FRISSBE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 952395.