The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/114745
Advancing WPI Fire Lab Fueled by UL and Lufkin Fund Grant IN A COLD, early December rain, Nick Demb- sey, Randy Harris, and Young-Geun You climbed three ladders to the roof of the annex of a new facility on Prescott Street, where they stood among the massive stainless steel components of the building's exhaust system. Dembsey, a professor in Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Fire Protection Engineering Department, Harris, the program's laboratory manager, and You, an FPE graduate student, were on the Ƃrst training session for the school's new Ƃre protection lab. Once on the roof, they and a handful of others followed a contractor's representative, who brought them in and out of metal rooftop rooms to show them Ƃlters, duct work, controls, safety features, and other aspects of the elaborate exhaust system. In one of the rooms, Harris cracked, "It's like a ship in here." Down below, where things will soon get very much hotter, workers were putting the Ƃnishing touches on the Ƃre protection laboratory, which opened in January 2013. Located at 50 Prescott Street, the new FPE lab has more than double the lab space available in Higgins Laboratories on the main campus and, with its 30-foot ceiling and 20-by-20-foot exhaust hood, will enable burns that are three to Ƃve times bigger, including simulated two-story building Ƃres. It will also allow researchers to run multiple experiments simultaneously. "We're going to build whatever size and shape thing we want," Professor Kathy Notarianni, head of the FPE Department, said of experiments that will be done. "We were space crunched. Now, we can do more." Next to the burn room, which is more formally called the performance laboratory, is the fundamentals lab, where bench-level research will be carried out on state-of-the-art equip- 70 Winter 2013 Professor Nick Dembsey, of WPI's Fire Protection Engineering Dept., stands proudly in the new fire lab.