Thomas Gernay
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Engineering·Early-career
Buildings must stay standing long enough during a fire for people to escape and firefighters to work. Newer building materials such as engineered mass timber and lightweight cold-formed steel can make construction cheaper, faster and more efficient.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
structural fire engineering
fire resilience
performance-based design
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2028
What they work on
- Derive accurate material models and properties for timber in realistic fires by analyzing recent fire test data with Bayesian inference and surrogate modeling.
- Build and validate a finite element framework for the fire-thermal-structural response of timber frames, and use it to construct fragility functions for fire-induced collapse.
- Use topology optimization, which finds the best placement of material, to design fire-resilient timber cross-sections and column layouts through a stiffness projection method.
- Test cold-formed steel studs and joists under a range of changing high temperatures with a new experimental method to measure how buckling and heat interact.
- Develop thermal-mechanical computer models, high-fidelity numerical benchmarks and analysis-based methods to assess the fire performance of cold-formed steel structures.
More about the research
However, their fire safety is often judged with simple rules or standard tests that do not capture how real fires and structures interact. Both projects aim to replace these rules with performance-based design, which predicts how a specific structure will actually behave in a realistic fire. They combine experiments and computer modeling to do so.
Why it matters
Fire safety gaps can slow the adoption of mass timber and make protecting cold-formed steel buildings costly. Better models and design methods could help engineers and building-code committees design safer, more resource-efficient and more affordable buildings. This could reduce the risk of fire-induced collapse for occupants and firefighters.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tara Hutchinson
University of California-San Diego, CA·Engineering
Test individual wall lines and building components of cold-formed steel framing to separate how designated shear walls, gravity walls, finishes and partitions each resist earthquake loads.
Andre Barbosa
Oregon State University, OR·Engineering
Isolate gross shear, net shear, and combined shear-torsion failure modes in lumber-based and veneer-based cross-laminated timber panels, using the Universal Panel Tester's controlled biaxial and twisting loads.
Alessandro F Rotta Loria
Northwestern University, IL·Engineering·Early-career
Measure the heat transfer, mass transfer and deformation of an underground garage wall retrofitted with geothermal panels, through continuous full-scale field monitoring of different fluid network setups.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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