The 40th “Interflam” conference (organiser: Interscience) was organised at the Royal Holloway College campus, University of London, UK, 1st – 3rd July 2019. With over 400 delegates from 50 countries worldwide, nearly 130 presentations (in three parallel sessions) and over 100 posters, Interflam covers all aspects of materials and applications, fire resistance, fire testing and modelling, human behaviour and security and rescue.
Sessions at Interflam 2019 covered the following questions:
- Construction facades
- Fire safety of wood and timber
- Furniture fire safety
- Environment and human health, smoke toxicity
- Fire detection and suppression
- Fire testing, measurement
- Modelling of fire and pyrolysis, fire spread
- Fire prevention, fire risk, fire safety engineering
- Human behaviour
- Compartment fires, pool fires
- Flame retardants
- Fire resistance and fire behaviour of materials
This Newsletter does not attempt to summarise all presentations from the conference, but selects some of the themes of particular topical interest for flame retardant applications.
The conference best paper awards were made to Colleen Wade (BRANZ Ltd, New Zealand) for work on modelling the fire dynamics in mass timber enclosures (CLT and glulam) and to Christopher Lee (University of Maryland, USA) for work on mitigating lithium ion battery pack thermal runaway propagation, see below.
The Interflam trophy for overall contribution to fire safety science (a large wooden spoon) was awarded to Patrick Van Hees, Lund University and President of IAFSS (International Association of Fire Safety Science).
Interflam papers http://www.intersciencecomms.co.uk/html/conferences/Interflam/if19/if19cfp.htm
The next (41st) Interflam will take place in three years (2022)