Aalto University master's thesis wins Nordic fire safety engineering award

The master’s thesis of Aleksi Rinta-Paavola was named the best in its field at the Nordic Fire and Safety Days 2018 conference.

Rinta-Paavola’s master's thesis dealt with the numerical simulation of high temperature thermochemical processes within stone wool.

’The model developed for the thesis could be used to replace some of the fire safety tests used to develop and assess building materials’, Rinta-Paavola says.

Rinta-Paavola studied chemistry before joining the Fire Safety Engineering team at the Department of Civil Engineering as a doctoral student. He was drawn to fire safety engineering by its multidisciplinarity and societal impact.

’I will have an opportunity to use chemistry in my doctoral dissertation, which discusses the functional fire safety design of wooden structures and includes modelling of pyrolysis and combustion. Fire safety engineering has also introduced me to thermodynamics, heat transfer, numerical computation – even human behaviour in evacuation scenarios!’ he adds.