The 12th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science has been held on June 12-16, 2017 at Lund University, Sweden. Dr. Zihe Gao from State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS), University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), was awarded 2017 Best Thesis Award “Excellence in Research”, for the thesis titled “Studies on Characteristics of Confined Fire Plumes and Mechanism of Natural Smoke Exhaust by Shaft in Tunnel Fires”, in collaboration between USTC and Ghent University (UGhent), Belgium. The thesis advisors are Prof. Jinhua Sun, Prof. Jie Ji at USTC and Prof. Bart Merci at UGhent.
The IAFSS Best Thesis Award “Excellence in Research” recognizes the best research thesis at PhD and Masters levels, in all the fields related to fire safety science and engineering. There are three such Awards for the three IAFSS regions, Europe and Africa, Americas, as well as Asia and Oceania.
This thesis addresses a very relevant problem, tunnel smoke management, and uses a very broad range of tools (model scale experiments, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and dimensional analysis) in a rigorous and meaningful way. The results provide relevant information of practical use including new criteria for design. The work has been extensively published in Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Energy and Buildings, etc., and the range of methods used have the potential to deliver high fidelity performance engineering tools. The comprehensive nature of this work and the rigour of the use of the different tools set this work aside from other submissions.
Besides, in his PhD, Dr. Zihe Gao was also awarded National scholarship for Postgraduates, Chinese Government Scholarship to sponsor Ph.D. student study abroad, President Prize of Chinese Academy of Sciences for Excellent Ph.D. Graduates, etc.

Fire plume behavior confined by the wall and ceiling boundary 

Smoke layer stratification and plug-holing in tunnel fire