Nils Johansson, Stefan Svensson and Patrick van Hees have been awarded with the prestigious Jack Bono Award for Engineering Communications.

The award recognize the author(s) of the paper published in the journal Fire Technology during the prior year that has most contributed to the advancement and application of professional fire protection engineering. Out of the 82 papers published in 2015 which were eligible for the award, the paper A Study of Reproducibility of a Full-Scale Multi-Room Compartment Fire Experiment, by Johansson, Svensson and van Hees, was first nominated by the Editorial Board as one of the best 10 papers in the journal, and then judged to be the winner by the Associate Editors of the journal.

The awarded 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 associate editors consider the work impressive and the data to be 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 have been done in the paper. The implications of this work are particularly important when engineers compare design and model calculations to experimental measurements from one or just a few experiments.

The award is named after Jack A. Bono, a Fellow and Past President of the SFPE who worked at Underwriters Laboratories Inc. (UL) for 44 years. Nils Johansson will go to the 2016 North America Conference & Expo “Engineering for Peak Performance", arranged by SFPE in Denver, USA September 25-27, to receive the prize.

The division of Fire Safety Engineering at Lund University is very happy and proud that this years Jack Bono Award goes to researchers at the division.