Collaboration agreement between CNRS and the French Centre for Buildings (CSTB)

On March 5, 2020, the French National Research Centre (CNRS) and the French Center for Buildings (CSTB) signed a 5-year framework agreement. The goal is to structure joint research projects involving a wide variety of scientific disciplines ranging from engineering to digital, including the humanities and social sciences.
 

Up to now, CSTB and CNRS have collaborated on an ad hoc basis through agreements by means of Joint Research Units (UMR). Between 2008 and 2018, there were thus 127 collaborative projects, 11 of which being still in progress. As an example, CETHIL and CSTB are working together on the propagation of fire on building facades. Thanks to its Vulcain test platform, CSTB carries out full-scale tests by igniting a facade in a free or controlled atmosphere. In parallel, researchers at CETHIL are seeking to identify parameters responsible for the propagation of combustion on a surface, in order to model the phenomena. “CSTB offers researchers the possibility of testing on a much larger scale what has been understood at the microscopic or even macroscopic level. This allows us to make significant progresses because we are advancing more quickly from the academic experimentation to the stages where business needs are met", explains Dany Escudié, CNRS research director at CETHIL and president of the CSTB Scientific Council.