2016 Jack Bono Award

The Jack Bono Award for Engineering Communications was awarded for their paper entitled “A Study of Reproducibility of a Full-Scale Multi-Room Compartment Fire Experiment that appeared in 2015 in Fire Technology” (Volume 51, Issue 3, pp 645-665, doi:10.1007/s10694-014-0408-3). The paper reports the measurements of numerous repeats of the same fire inside a multi-compartment set up conducted during a long period of time. The aim was to capture in-depth and for the first time the reproducibility and degree of variability of compartment fires. The work is impressive and the data is most useful to fire protection engineering. It is not too rare to read in the technical literature about a fire experiment being repeated twice, three times at most, but no study to date provides 45 replicates of the same experiment with subsequent statistically analysis of the data as you have done. The implications of this work are particularly important when engineers compare design and model calculations to experimental measurements from a one or just a few experiments.