Fire Safety in the Built Environment

Dear Colleagues,

Fire safety in the built environment remains a fundamental challenge as modern buildings and infrastructure systems continue to increase in scale, complexity and functional integration. Contemporary built environments—including residential and commercial buildings, transportation facilities, underground spaces and industrial infrastructure—are characterized by diverse spatial configurations, high occupant densities and increasingly stringent performance requirements. These features collectively lead to complex fire scenarios with significant implications for life safety, property protection and structural resilience.

Fire development in enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces is governed by a range of interacting physical processes, including combustion, heat transfer, smoke generation and movement and boundary interactions. Variations in architectural layout, material properties, enclosure geometry and environmental conditions can result in highly nonlinear fire behaviour and unexpected hazard escalation. Such complexity presents substantial challenges for fire safety engineering, particularly in the context of performance-based design, emergency response planning and post-fire risk assessment.

Addressing fire safety in the built environment, therefore, requires an integrated and multidisciplinary approach that combines fundamental fire science, experimental investigation, numerical modelling and engineering application. A systematic understanding of fire behaviour and its interaction with building systems is essential for the development of robust design methodologies, reliable assessment tools and effective mitigation strategies applicable to modern built environments.

This Special Issue aims to provide a comprehensive platform for advancing both scientific understanding and engineering practice in fire safety within the built environment. It seeks to bring together contributions that address fundamental mechanisms, modelling approaches, experimental studies and practical engineering solutions related to fire safety in buildings and infrastructure systems.

The topic of this Special Issue is closely aligned with the journal’s scope in fire science, fire safety engineering and performance-based design. By covering a broad range of theoretical and applied research, the Special Issue aims to foster knowledge exchange between researchers and practitioners and to support the development of improved design methodologies and risk mitigation strategies for contemporary built environments.

The Special Issue welcomes original research articles, review papers and technical notes on topics including, but not limited to:

1. Fire safety challenges in the built environment
2. Fire dynamics in buildings and enclosed spaces
3. Smoke generation, movement and hazard development
4. Experimental studies on fires in buildings and infrastructure systems
5. Numerical modelling and simulation of fire behaviour
6. Fire safety engineering methods and assessment tools
7. Performance-based fire safety design and evaluation
8. Tenability, evacuation safety and occupant protection
9. Fire risk assessment and mitigation strategies
10. Case studies and lessons learned from real fire incidents

This Special Issue aims to provide a comprehensive platform for advancing scientific knowledge and engineering practice related to compartment fires and broader fire safety issues in the built environment.

Prof. Dr. Guowei Zhang
Dr. Lu He
Dr. Tianwei Chu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Fire is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• compartment fires
• smoke control
• HVAC systems
• CFD modelling
• performance-based design
• travelling fires