Heat and Fire Lab

News

Francesco speaks on the Fire Science Show

Francesco joins the Fire Science Show Podcast where he was interviewed about Wildfire Spread modelling and his recent ERC grant.

November 13, 2024.

Listen to the Podcast episode

Francesco presents for HK SFPE Student Chapter

Francesco gave an invited talk on wildfires at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. You can watch the talk on Youtube.

November 4, 2024.

Watch the talk on Youtube

FUSE internship 2024

We've enjoyed having Anton Pustygin from Imperial in our group this summer as part of a Faraday Institution Summer Research Experience placement. You can read about his project in the attached poster

October 3, 2024.

Read poster here

Francesco awarded an ERC Starting Grant

Delighted to share that my project FIREMOD has been funded by an ERC Starting Grant. Very excited to embark on 5 years of engineering team research on wildfire modelling, to help improve predictions of when and why wildfires spread.

September 5, 2024.

Read press release

Elena joins the Heat and Fire Lab

We welcome Elena Funk, who is joining us as a PhD student focused on the development of a methodology for the definition of battery fire scenarios.

August 13, 2024.

Abdullah joins the Heat and Fire Lab

We welcome Abudllah Rehman, who is joining us as a PhD student focused on the impact of wildfires in the wildland-urban interface as part of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires.

August 13, 2024.

Francesco contributes to a UK Parliament POST research briefing

Francesco contributed to a UK Parliament POST research briefing on the wildfire risk to the UK landscape.

April 15, 2024.

Read the POST Briefing

Hosein speaks about his PhD journey as part of KCL PhD informational video

Hosein Sadeghi talks about his PhD journey in Engineering here at KCL Heat and Fire Lab.

November 27, 2023.

Watch the video on Youtube

Francesco speaks on battery fires at the Green Fire Safety Conference

Back in May 2023 Francesco presented on Battery Safety at the Green Fire Safety Conference, the talk is now available to all on youtube.

October 6, 2023.

Watch the talk on Youtube

Francesco speaks on the Fire Science Show

Francesco joins the Fire Science Show Podcast where he was interviewed about Battery Safety.

September 13, 2023.

Listen to the Podcast episode

New Paper published in Fire Technology on battery heat release rate measurement

New paper comes out from the group led by Francesco in collaboration with Newcastle University, on digital imaging use for heat release rate measurements in LIB fires.

September 12, 2023.

Read the paper

Francesco promoted to Senior Lecturer at KCL

Group Lead Francesco Restuccia has been promoted to Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor UK). Congratulations!

July 11, 2023.

New paper published in Journal of Energy Storage

New paper comes out from the group, led by Alireza Sarmadian and part of the EPSRC Prosperity partnership with JLR, on on simulations of a cylindrical battery using physics-based, simplified and generalised lumped models

June 20, 2023.

Read the paper here

Ally joins the Heat and Fire Lab

We welcome Ally Mamgain, who is joining us as a part-time PhD student focused on the impact of battery fires in subterranean environments!

June 5, 2023.

Visiting PhD student joins from PolyU Fire Lab

We welcome Zilong Wang, visiting PhD student from Prof Huang's Fire Lab at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who is joining us for 6 months as a visiting PhD student!

April 6, 2023.

New grant from Faraday Institution- SAFEBATT

The Heat and Fire Lab is joining the Faraday Institution Major Project SAFEBATT! With a new project focussing on modelling thermal runaway and fire propagation in lithium-ion batteries, We hope that by including modelling fire dynamics aspects, to understand and predict the consequence of battery failure and the spike in heat output of flaming cells, fire science and fire engineering techniques can shed light on the thermal runaway so destructive to battery cells.

March 30, 2023.

Francesco presents at the EFCE Spotlight Talks

Francesco presented at the European Federation of Chemical Engineering some work on Electrostatic safety, funded by NFPA Research Fundation and lead by Ioana Sandu. You can watch the talk on youtube!

November 21, 2022.

Watch the talk here

Best paper award at HEFAT-ATE22

The Heat and Fire Lab has won it's first best paper award! With a paper led by Dr Alireza Sarmadian on an experimentally verified thermal-electrochemical simulation model of a 21700 cell using a lumped semi-empirical battery model, the paper was awarded best paper in energy storage at HEFAT-ATE 2022.

September 23, 2022.

Read the award winning paper here

Hosein joins Heat and Fire Lab

Hosein Sadeghi joined our lab this week as a PhD student, and his research will focus on lithium-ion battery fires.

June 20, 2022.

Fire Science Show Podcast

Francesco joins the Fire Science Show Podcast to talk about battery fires and safety research around batteries.

May 4, 2022.

Listen to the Podcast

Lab in the KCL climate change spotlight

On the week of COP26 conference, KCL included our group's research in the work the university is doing to help address the COP26 goals.

November 1, 2021.

Read the Article

Alireza joins Heat and Fire Lab

Dr Alireza Sarmadian joined our lab this week as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, funded on an EPSRC Prosperty Partneship Project with Jaguar Land Rover. His work will focus on studying the thermophysical behaviour of a Lithium-ion battery cell during its operation and lifetime.

October 1, 2021.

Imogen joins Heat and Fire Lab

Imogen Richards joined our lab this week as a PhD student, and her research will focus on fire spread modelling in wildfires.

October 1, 2021.

Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires posts a blog entry on our group's wildfire work

Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires posts a blog entry on our group's work in wildfires.

August 16, 2021.

Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires posts a blog entry on our group's recent work on self-heating ignition

Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires posts a blog entry on our group's paper, Spontaneous ignition of smouldering peat fires (and how to simulate them in the field)

May 10, 2021.

Francesco awarded Jack Watts Award

Francesco has been awarded the 2020 Jack Watts Award for Outstanding Reviewer by Fire Technology for outstanding quality, in-depth, number, and timelieness of reviews.

April 13, 2020.

Francesco joins KCL!

Research spotlight article from KCL introducing Francesco and 2 more new academics in the Department of Engineering.

November 7, 2019.

Dr Francesco Restuccia

Group Leader

Associate Professor (UK Senior Lecturer), Department of Engineering, King's College London.

Where we are

Department of Engineering, King's College London

The Department of Engineering is a growing department at KCL, an internationally renowned university delivering exceptional education and world-leading research based in London, United Kingdom.

Join us!

Opportunities

We welcome highly-motivated students and postdoctoral researchers with an interest in thermal engineering or fire science to join our group.