Today, we’re shining the spotlight on Charlie Hopkin, whose experience in computational modelling and performance-based design strengthens our fire safety engineering practices.
Charlie’s approach, grounded in research and practical application, guides design teams in delivering projects beyond conventional standards, ensuring both safety and architectural integrity.
Q: Charlie, can you discuss the role of computational modelling in modern fire safety engineering and its impact on project outcomes?
Charlie: The truism is that computational modelling in fire safety can support building designs where the adoption of guidance may not be feasible or appropriate, so we can quantify the demonstration of safety in some way and still preserve the architectural intent. The ‘feasible’ part is historically where computational modelling came to the rescue (sometimes mistakenly treated as a silver bullet), but the ‘appropriate’ part is where it is starting to get more interesting. There are so many questions around the suitability of guidance in the current fire safety environment that we’re regularly using computational models to verify whether existing recommendations remain adequate, whether they’re rational, or whether more needs to be done to demonstrate safety. That means we’re able to offer clients suitable alternatives to guidance but also provide them with additional confidence in their designs.
Perhaps a less commonly mentioned benefit of computational modelling, and quantitative assessment more generally, is the transparency it offers to the parties involved. It substantiates the assumptions, inputs, and outputs which have led an engineer towards a certain decision, and stakeholders are afforded an opportunity to scrutinise and make an informed decision as a result. Whereas with many guidance documents and standards, the process of their inception to implementation can be buried under such a heavy shroud of secrecy and formality that we are often only able to hypothesise over the intent. “Standards don’t need to use references,” “Standards don’t need to justify themselves,” or so I’ve heard said second-hand, whereas computational modelling is typically expected to do both.
Q: What do you consider to be the value of research when working in a fire safety consultancy environment?
Charlie: ‘Research’ is one of those words that gets uttered so frequently in the fire safety industry these days that it feels like semantic satiation – we’ve said the word so many times that it’s lost meaning. I am usually hesitant to use it lest it be misconstrued by those deeply engaged in academic research, but I’ve yet to find a succinct alternative. Ultimately, our focus is pursuing interesting and useful endeavours – and we want to publish our findings where possible, allowing others to look into it if they choose.
Research or not, I think it’s important to try to be practical, and that’s the different perspective that working in industry offers. I wouldn’t want someone to repeatedly expend lots of time, energy, and resources on something if they could not see a valuable outcome and a realistic way for it to be implemented in practice. There is a lot of exciting work done that is never dragged out of the aether and into the built environment because it’s missing the pragmatic connection between concept and reality. It’s very early days in developing our ‘research’ capacity, but we’re excited to join some of the other fire safety consultancies who’ve contributed significant funding and published great work with real-world implications for many years.
Q: How has your PhD on probabilistic assessment in fire safety design influenced your consulting practice?
Charlie: I did my PhD part-time while working as a full-time consultant, and I already had experience as a consultant for several years before that point. So, that gave me the benefit of having knowledge of industry and how fire engineering works in the built environment. I was also afforded the opportunity to select and steer my own PhD topic throughout, which meant I could tailor it to what I was seeing day-to-day.
The PhD identified distribution functions for a lot of the parameters we frequently use in fire and smoke modelling, and I then applied these functions in probabilistic models of everyday assessments like smoke control in residential corridors. Initially, it helped to contextualise many of the existing assumptions we see in modelling guidance documents and also highlighted how, in a lot of cases, these assumptions can come across as arbitrary. Off the back of that, we’ve implemented less computationally intensive probabilistic models as an initial step to help identify our ‘reasonable worst-case’ scenarios, and then these scenarios are simulated in more detail using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. There’s a lot of work for us still to do to further clarify what defines a ‘reasonable worst-case’ relative to the overall building design and consequences of a fire, but it feels like a step in the right direction compared to the traditional approach of selecting historically defined design fires and assessing performance in the same way no matter how tall, long, populated, complex, or simple the building is.
Q: You’ve been leading the Manchester office for close to three years now. How is that going so far?
Charlie: It’s going very well. We’ll be up to seven full-time engineers in Manchester from June, hopefully with one or two more to join later in the year. We accommodate remote and flexible working, but the office remains busy most days, and the convenience of the location near Manchester Piccadilly Station means we have people from our other locations visiting on a weekly basis. The general consensus seems to be that we’re a relaxed and welcoming office, and people feel comfortable to be themselves.
Now that we’re getting a bit bigger, we’re focusing on organising more collective training and knowledge sharing within the office. In addition to the team regularly attending external events, we’ve been having fortnightly technical presentations and discussions covering topics like quality assurance, zone modelling, CFD modelling, smoke control, sprinkler systems, detection and alarm systems, international approaches to approvals, etc. The discussions are implemented on a scheduled rota, so everyone is involved, and it’s embedded into the calendar early on.
The day-to-day deliverables from the office have included fire strategies for football stadia, 100+ m tall residential towers, townhouses, market halls, offices, schools, warehouses, with a decent dose of fire and smoke modelling, evacuation modelling, etc. Outside of that, everyone has the chance to be involved in our many internal research and technical notes. The purpose of these notes is to offer insight and solutions to problems where there is a lack of information – or a fair amount of uncertainty. But we also find it particularly helpful in getting the graduates and newer engineers into the habit of investigating new concepts, as well as learning how to deviate from standard template structures and go ‘off-script’ in both their thinking and report writing.
Q: What strategic initiatives are you most excited to lead or implement at Ashton Fire in the years ahead?
Charlie: We’re collaborating with a university on a significant bid for external funding, with the intent to further develop our specialist capabilities in performance-based design – our application was submitted in January and was confirmed as successful in April. We will also be funding a PhD with another university in relation to the fire safety design of car parks. With any luck, less vague descriptions will be revealed in the annals of social media in the imminent future.
Then there is the obligatory mention of artificial intelligence (AI), where we’ve recently put together an AI steering group, expanding on our internal policy from last year. As part of that, we’ve been successful in recruiting interns currently studying mathematics or computer science to develop fire safety tools and investigate recent technological developments.
I’m also looking forward to continuing my role as a visiting research fellow with the University of Manchester. Ashton Fire had the chance to propose MSc topics to the School of Engineering, so I’m looking forward to those potentially being picked up.
Q: How do you envision the future of Ashton Fire in the evolving landscape of fire safety and sustainability, and what role do you see yourself playing in that vision?
Charlie: I want us to continue supporting practical and viable solutions in tandem with demonstrating adequate safety. That involves appreciating that fire safety cannot exist within a vacuum – or be kept in a metaphorical four-hour fire resistant concrete box, absent of furniture and modern technology. We cannot expect safety ad infinitum, and there are always knock-on effects and unintended consequences in other areas, and it’s important to maintain a sensible balance. So, while I’m motivated to continue improving our understanding of fire safety, I am also keen to increase our awareness of the complex network of wider implications. Encouraging diversity of thought and exploring further afield when pooling resources, recruiting, and collaborating will help to improve the company’s grasp of the wider implications of the role.
