Angus Grandison

Dr Angus Grandison BSc(Hons), MSc, PhD

Senior Lecturer

Dr Grandison is a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics whose area of research is in evacuation and fire safety.  He is deeply involved in both the development and application of the EXODUS evacuation modelling and the SMARTFIRE fire modelling software products. This work has been applied to the building, aviation, maritime, and railway sectors.  He is responsible for the development of the parallel versions of EXODUS and SMARTFIRE models that enable larger problems to be simulated faster.

He has worked on numerous EU funded projects for fire and evacuation including FIREDASS (1997-2000), FIREPROOF (2009-2012), and GETAWAY (2011-14).  His consultancy experience includes the fire and evacuation modelling of a cruise ship for Lloyd’s Register required for IMO certification (2019-2020).  He has also worked on the forensic fire modelling of the Swissair Flight 111 crash. More recently he has investigated the risk of airborne transmission of covid-19 in passenger aircraft cabins with potential mitigations (2020-).  He was the lead developer on a home office sponsored project “Parallel Implementation of EXODUS” (2005-2008). Dr Grandison was also involved in the experimental setup and collection of egress data from the IOSH construction site trials (2017).

Dr Grandison helps organise and deliver the annual Principles and Practice of Fire Modelling short course, contributes to the design of lecture material and manages laboratory sessions in the use of the SMARTFIRE fire simulation tools. Furthermore, he has organised, developed, and delivered on-line e-learning courses as well as short courses to international client bases.  He lectures and teaches on a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Mathematics and Computer Science.

Dr Grandison has successfully supervised three PhD researchers:

  • Domain partitioning and software modifications towards the parallelisation of the buildingEXODUS evacuation software.
  • Development of a novel hybrid field and zone fire model.
  • GPGPU enabled CFD simulation for fully coupled fire and evacuation modelling.

He is an invited peer article reviewer for “Fire Technology”, “Fire and Materials”, “Ocean Engineering”, “Journal of Building Engineering”, “Atmosphere”, and “Safety Science” journals.

Computer science Mathematics

Responsibilities within the university
  • Senior Lecturer and Tutor in Mathematics and Computer Science.
  • Developer and researcher in Fire Safety.
  • Supervision of undergraduate, masters and doctoral students.
  • Internal PhD examiner and chair.
  • Exam moderator.

Awards

2014: EU FP7 Research Project: “GETAWAY” (Intelligent Active Dynamic Signage Systems) was awarded the prestigious Research Impact Award as part of The Guardian University Awards.

2012: Co-authored “The Development of modelling methods and interface tools supporting a risk based approach to fire safety in ship design”, that won the GL COMPIT best paper award.

2006: Co-authored journal papers: “CFD Fire Simulation of the Swissair Flight 111 In-Flight Fire - Parts 1 & 2”, which appeared in the Aeronautical Journal 2006, won the Royal Aeronautical Society's Gold Award and George Taylor Prize.

Research / Scholarly interests
  • Fire modelling
  • Water-mist modelling
  • Evacuation modelling
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Parallel Processing via OpenMP, MPI and GPU
  • Modelling of aerosol-based pathogens
  • Convergence of stochastic evacuation models.

Key funded projects

Dr Grandison has worked on numerous EU funded projects for fire and evacuation including FIREDASS (1997-2000), FIREPROOF (2009-2012), and GETAWAY (2011-14). His consultancy experience includes the fire and evacuation modelling of a cruise ship for Lloyd’s Register required for IMO certification (2019-2020). He has also worked on the forensic fire modelling of the Swissair Flight 111 crash. More recently he has investigated the risk of airborne transmission of covid-19 in passenger aircraft cabins with potential mitigations (2020-). He was the lead developer on a home office sponsored project “Parallel Implementation of EXODUS” (2005-2008). Dr Grandison was also involved in the experimental setup and collection of egress data from the IOSH construction site trials (2017).

Dr Grandison (2022) is also involved in the EPSRC One-Heart project, looking at the evacuation safety of future aircraft designs, and the EU funded Healthy Sailing project, examining the spread and potential mitigations of covid-19 and other infectious diseases using Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Recent publications

Article

Wang, Zhaozhi , Galea, Edwin R., Grandison, Angus, Ewer, John , Jia, Fuchen (2021), A coupled computational fluid dynamics and Wells-Riley model to predict COVID-19 infection probability for passengers on long-distance trains. Elsevier. In: , , , . Elsevier, Safety Science, 147: 105572 ISSN: 0925-7535 (Print), (doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105572).

Wang, Zhaozhi , Galea, Edwin R., Grandison, Angus, Ewer, John , Jia, Fuchen (2021), Inflight transmission of COVID-19 based on experimental aerosol dispersion data. Oxford University Press. In: , , , Inflight Transmission of COVID-19 Based on Aerosol Dispersion Data. Oxford University Press, Journal of Travel Medicine, 28: taab023 (4) ISSN: 1195-1982 (Print), 1708-8305 (Online) (doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/jtm/taab023).

Grandison, Angus and , (2020), Determining confidence intervals, and convergence, for parameters in stochastic evacuation models. Springer Nature. In: , , , . Springer Nature, Fire Technology, 56 . pp. 2137-2177 ISSN: 0015-2684 (Print), 1572-8099 (Online) (doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-020-00968-0).

Grandison, Angus , Deere, Steven, Lawrence, Peter, Galea, Edwin Richard (2017), The use of confidence intervals to determine convergence of the total evacuation time for stochastic evacuation models. Elsevier Ltd.. In: , , , . Elsevier Ltd., Ocean Engineering, 146 . pp. 234-245 ISSN: 0029-8018 (Print), (doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oceaneng.2017.09.047).

Grandison, A. , Cavanagh, Y., Lawrence, P. J., Galea, E. R. (2017), Increasing the simulation performance of large-scale evacuations using parallel computing techniques based on domain decomposition. Springer US. In: , , , . Springer US, Fire Technology, 53 (3) . pp. 1399-1438 ISSN: 0015-2684 (Print), 1572-8099 (Online) (doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-016-0645-8).

Monograph

Ewer, J. , Galea, E., Grandison, A., Patel, M. (2017), SMARTFIRE v4.4: technical reference manual. University of Greenwich. In: , , , . University of Greenwich, Greenwich, London, UK (doi: ).

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