Fire Safety Technology – (M.Sc.)

Programme overview

* Master's Programme, 2 Years, Full time
* 120 credits
* Lund Campus
* Study period: 03 Sep 2012 – 09 Jun 2014

Fire Safety Engineering is a multidisciplinary field that requires a deep understanding of building design and construction, the thermo-chemical processes associated to fire growth, human behaviour and the representation of the many uncertainties through risk modelling. The three members of this consortium are leading European institutions in the field of fire safety, providing both educational programmes and high level research. Ghent aims at general FSE , Lund is a recognized in enclosure fire dynamics, human behaviour during fires and evacuation and towards methods for risk assessment and Edinburgh is the developer of the first curriculum in structural Fire Safety Engineering. All three partners are deeply involved in the transformation of the profession through diverse committees and professional organizations and are key players in the evolution of world-wide regulatory frameworks. The master students can benefit from the joint expertise of the partners and emerge as leading experts in the rapidly evolving field of FSE, as they will possess a broadly-based and high level of knowledge.

Currently, the extreme need for FSE in Europe and around the world is leading to a proliferation of remedial short courses and a few low level higher education degrees that are not founded on a strong knowledge and experience base. These programmes are delivering professionals with degrees to a practise that has no definition of competence. Thus the transformation of the field is slow, with many mistakes being made and a deep seeded confusion of the skills required for an adequate PBD. As three leading European research institutions in this field, we are joining together with the main objective of creating an educational programme that defines the required knowledge for a professional fire safety engineer, capable of developing a PBD.

The major educational objectives of the course are that the master students in FSE:

* are able to critically evaluate and construct an original, performance based, fire safe design;
* understand the complexity and evolution of the design tools and the many existing gaps of knowledge and limitations;
* understand the current research trends and are able to subsequently perform scientific (PhD level) research in the domain of FSE;
* gain an awareness of the professional context and the broad problems in FSE.

The detailed educational objectives of this course are that the master students in FSE:

* can evaluate and make a motivated choice of different types of fire detection and suppression (passive and active) and develop a quantitative performance assessment;
* can identify structural weaknesses in fire and provide a quantitative assessment of performance;
* can make detailed risk analyses;
* can establish quantitative egress patterns in case of fire;
* have knowledge on national and international (especially European) regulation; can collaborate with FSE colleagues.

The EMMC is to provide a top-notch education that enables those participating to emerge as leading experts in the field of Fire Safety Engineering. The leading role and complementary expertise of the partners offer the best conditions for the transfer of knowledge and know-how in the multi-disciplinary domain of FSE.