International Fire Consultants Ltd (IFC) - International Fire Consultants Ltd Engineer scoops the ABE Fire Safety Award 2007

Hans van de Weijgert, a Senior Structural Fire Engineer at International Fire Consultants Ltd
(IFC) has won the prestigious ABE Fire Safety Award for 2007 with his new 3D Interpolation
Method for establishing the dry film thickness of intumescent coatings for the protection of
steelwork. This prestigious award was presented at the Annual ABE Dinner on 23rd March 2007.Interpolating data sets, which consist of the results of a series of fire resistance tests, have always proven to be subjective and inherently unrepeatable. Much of the interpretation has been based upon generating linear relationships between points against which one then extracts the potential fire resistance performance of any intermediate sized components, thicknesses or other variables. One particular form of fire protection that has been prone to interpolation errors has been the dry film thickness analysis of intumescent coatings used to protect steelwork. Comparisons between the results from various assessment authorities show just how difficult it is to achieve similar estimates of these thicknesses.Hans van de Weijgert considered that with modern computing power, one should be able to do
better. Therefore, during one of those week-ends when Hans was neither flying back from
somewhere nor flying off to somewhere else, and with the aid of a ball of string and a set of
kebab skewers, Hans set about trying to formulate plains between data points upon which the
results can be directly compared. Even from this embryonic model, one could see that distinct
plains were being generated between data points upon which the intermediate values would sit.
This immediately takes any judgement out of the process and the intermediate data is generated
very simply and with a high degree of confidence.Hans then set about putting mathematical relationships to the boundaries of these plains and
from these it was straightforward to analyse almost any size of data set and create this factual
representation of the performance.The ultimate endorsement of the principle occurred when Hans presented the principles to the
ISO TC92/SC2 appropriate working group who immediately endorsed the inclusion of the
principle into the ISO 834: Part 11 draft standard.

Email: ifc@intfire.com