Professor Ofodike (D.K.) Ezekoye (left) and Dr. Kristopher Overholt (right) receive the 2013 Bigglestone Award for Excellence in Fire Protection Concepts from Kathleen Almand, P.E., Vice President, Research, of the National Fire Protection Association.
The recipients of the 2013 National Fire Protection Association's Harry C. Bigglestone Award for Excellence in Communication of Fire Protection Concepts are Dr. Kristopher Overholt and Professor Ofodike (D.K.) Ezekoye, both from The University of Texas at Austin, for their paper, Characterizing Heat Release Rates Using an Inverse Fire Modeling Technique.
Overholt was a May 2013 doctoral graduate of the Department of Civil Architectural and Environmental Engineering. Professor Ezekoye teaches in the Mechanical Engineering Department and served as Overholt's research supervisor. Overholt is now a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This paper communicates the development of an algorithm that uses temperature readings from sensors inside a compartment to calculate the fire growth rate (i.e., the heat release rate). This contribution directly leads to an enhanced understanding of real fires and opens the way to new forensic reconstruction techniques and sensor driven firefighting approaches. As a token of appreciation, Springer has made the paper Open Access [free link to paper].
The Harry C. Bigglestone award is presented annually, along with a $5,000 cash prize, to the author(s) of the most outstanding paper submitted to Fire Technology during the previous calendar year, as voted by the International Editorial Board. This award is named after the late Harry C. Bigglestone, a trustee of the Fire Protection Research Foundation, and fellow and president of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. The award was presented at the General Section Reception at the NFPA Conference & Expo on Tuesday, June 12, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois.
