Dr. XIE Pengsun from USTC Honored with 2023 Best Thesis Award ‘Excellence in Research’ by IAFSS
XIE Pengsun is a PhD graduate of the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). At the 14th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science held in Tsukuba, Japan, October 22-27, 2023, the PhD dissertation of XIE, namely Experimental and Theoretical Study on the Ejected Facade Flame Behavior from Compartment Fires under Different Ventilation Conditions, receives the 2023 Best Thesis Award “Excellence in Research” of International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). As a result, Dr. XIE was invited to give an academic presentation named Experimental study of ejected fire plume from an opening under facing wind passing through the roof at the conference.
ISFSS is the most authoritative and influential global academic organization on fire safety. ISFSS established the Best Thesis Award, which aims at rewarding exceptionally outstanding Ph.D. and master’s theses in the field of fire safety science. The award is presented every three years, with three winners selected globally each time, from the Asia-Australia Region, the Europe and Africa Region, and the Americas Region respectively.
Certificate of Award of Dr. XIE. (Image from USTC)
Dr. XIE was invited to give an academic presentation at the conference. (Image from USTC)
Dr. XIE and his supervisor at the conference. (Image from USTC)
Dr. XIE entered SKLFS in 2016 for his master’s and doctoral degree, supervised by Prof. HU Longhua, during which he was qualified for the national scholarship to study abroad, and went to the group of Prof. Bart Merci at Ghent University, Belgium, for one year of joint training. His Ph.D. dissertation was oriented to the important problems and scientific challenges of three-dimensional fires in facades of high-rise buildings and systematically realized the theoretical breakthrough of the mechanism of the influence of different ventilation conditions on the behavior of cavity fires and fire overflow in openings of facades. His innovative contributions mainly included: (1) revealed the complex coupling mechanism of turbulence-combustion and the law of temperature evolution for cavity fires under the effect of ambient wind, as well as the combustion behavior of part of the interior of the cavity under the conditions of different ignition sources, and proposed a new method for the fire turnover behavior of interior fire, and put forward a critical model of fire transition in chambers; (2) discovered the characteristics of oscillatory behavior and the main control mechanism of facade open-ended fire overflow, which is significantly different from that of free-fire plume, and established an open-ended fire overflow oscillatory model for the first time, which is an important expansion and supplement of the flame oscillation theory; (3) realized a theoretical breakthrough of the kinetic mechanism of open-ended fire overflow under the complex coupling of ambient winds and thermal buoyancy of fires, and established a new model of open-ended fire overflow dynamics under ambient winds and thermal buoyancy of fires. The results of the Ph.D. dissertation have also served the national strategic task of assessing the damage of urban fires induced by extreme high-intensity heat flow. The doctoral thesis had been selected as the outstanding doctoral thesis of both USTC and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Dr. XIE is currently a specially appointed associate professor at SKLFS, selected for the 2021 Postdoctoral Innovation Talents Support Program, and he is in charge of The National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, the sub-project of National Key Research and Development Program of China and other scientific research projects. He has published more than 10 SCI papers in Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, Combustion and Flame and Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, etc., as the first or corresponding author, which are the top journals in the field of energy and combustion. He has also co-edited the first academic monograph on fire overflow from building facade openings in China, namely Dynamics and Basic Theory of Fire Overflow from Building Facade Openings. He has been awarded the National Scholarship for Postgraduates, the Excellent Student Prize of President fellowships of CAS, and the First Prize of the Chinese Association for Occupational Safety and Health, etc.