Fire Science Show

You don’t always need a furnace to end up with a fire resistance rating, but you do need to understand what kind of “proof” you’re actually creating. I’m joined again by Dr. Piotr Turkowski from ITB to unpack calculation methods for fire resistance and the real-world chain from engineering assumptions to a Declaration of Performance. We talk about when standards and European Assessment Documents (...

In this episode of fire fundamentals with the ITB fire resistance expert Piotr Turkowski we break down what a fire resistance rating criteria, and what the letters behind ratings like “REI 60” exactly stand for. We use lab experience to explain where the standards are clear, where they are oddly traditional, and where comparisons between products can mislead.  • ISO definition of fire resistance a...

plume_rise_1.fds from the FDS Validation Guide (by NIST) &HEAD CHID='plume_rise_1',  TITLE='Test plume rise height in stable atmosphere' / &MESH IJK=50,52,50, XB=-50.,50.,-52.,52.,0.,100., MULT_ID='mesh1' / &MULT ID='mesh1', DZ=100., K_UPPER=1 / &MESH IJK=50,52,50, XB= 50.,250.,-104.,104.,0.,200., MULT_ID='mesh2' / &MULT ID=&apo...

When one takes a decision to evacuate and starts moving, this is not the end of their decision-making process.  Which route to take? Who to contact? How to arrange a place of shelter? Where to go first? Have I forgotten anything?  I previously discussed the decision-making with Erica Kuligowski from RMIT, and today we're meeting again to follow up on decision-making for large-scale evacuation...

A fire in an informal settlement is not just another small building fire. It can be the first domino in a fast-moving neighborhood event, and the little details like the wall material, roof material, door location, even a light breeze, can decide what happens next. I’m joined by Dr. Sam Stevens from Kindling to unpack a massive FSRI funded experimental program carried out in South Africa that burn...

Being a part of broader civil engineering and built environment sciences, we have the unique opportunity to learn from other "sister" disciplines, rather than coming up with everything on our own. Especially, when those disciplines have 100+ years of experience in investigating stuff that has recently emerged as one of the leading challenges in our field. The other discipline is Earthqua...

Is it too late to start with the AI in 2026? It wen't so far, does it still make sense to get interested in this technology? Absolutely. Today we sit down with MZ Naser of Clemson University to map a clear, useful path for engineers who want results without the hype. We start with the basics - clean data, the right algorithm, and a realistic mindset - and climb toward explainability, causalit...

I’m not stressed by AI itself. I’m stressed by the insatiable greed of those who profit from it, even if it means sacrificing large parts of the population. I'm also stressed about how ruthlessly it can be abused to cause deliberate harm. In this episode I'm not taking you into world of fire science, but rather into my own thoughts on how the AI revolution influences our lives. And I was...

A tunnel can ride out a fire without collapsing (or even critical visible structural damage), but a question whether it is safe for operations, and what is its long-term residual fire resistance remains. With repair bills being in high seven-eight figures, this is more than just a theoretical question... In this episode we dig into the hard middle ground of fire damage post mild/large fires, and c...

Welcome to another fire fundamentals episode! Today we dig into how to place a fire in a model so results reflect real physics. From plume inputs to FDS burners, we show where HRRPUA, radiative fraction, and D* make or break smoke your calculations. Things considered in this episode: • why defining the design HRR is separate from placing the source • what a flame is and why we cannot resolve its c...

Welcome back to Fire Fundamentals! Today with prof. Ali Rangwala from WPI and dr Lorenz Boeck from Rembe and WPI we take the world of explosion protection engineering.  In this episode we touch: • distinguishing fires and explosions by time scale and damage mode • taxonomy of explosions by energy density and deposition time • hybrid mixtures in coal mines and turbulent burning velocity • severity...

A tight, historic cellar. Arched ceilings. Long corridors. Tiny shafts. We faced a design wall: to keep routes tenable, we needed twice the extraction that the building could carry. At that point, I've failed as an engineer - I've reached my limit and could not find a solution. Some time later, a solution appeared in my head from nowhere —what if the fan changed with the fire? Not in a c...

A fire in a public venue happened again. No, I am not talking about the one in Switzerland. Since the tragic New Year celebration, we had one more near-miss in Madrid on Jan 10th 2026... In fact, who knows how many we actually had? It is a tragedy that feels like it is playing on repeat...  In this podcast episode, we try to dig into why nightclub fires follow the same script decade after decade—w...

Today we sit down with safety science leader George Boustras - a professor at European University Cyprus, UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Societal Safety in South East Mediterranean and founder of Centre of Excellence in Risk & Decision Sciences (CERIDES). With George we try to examine fire engineering from the wider safety lens, exploring why culture—not just compliance—decides ou...

Fires in informal settlements and humanitarian settings rarely make headlines, but they define daily life for millions. We sit down with Kindling founder Danielle Antonelis to trace a four-year arc from the non-profits early days and ideas to grounded results: a global shelter database, experimental campaign with 20 full-scale burns, and a learning model that puts residents first. The core shift i...

Catastrophes don’t happen because of one bad decision; they happen when many small assumptions fail at the same time. I take this opportunity to talk about my thoughts related to the Wang Fuk Court fire in Hong Kong. I attempt to examine how a routine ignition escalated into hundreds of compartment fires across multiple buildings—and what that says about the limits of our current fire engineering....

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you Merry Christmas, a great time with your families, a bit of rest and time to reflect, and an awesome 2026 to come! If you are desperate for fire science on Christmas Eve, check out the OFR report on open car park fires, which we were able to contribute to: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fire-safety-open-sided-car-parks ---- The Fire Scie...

Today we cover another branch of safety of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), that is explosion prevention in mitigation. I always thought you can either end with a fire or with an explosion, and boy I was wrong... but we will go back to this later. Now I bring on Dr. Lorenz Boeck (REMBE) and Nick Bartlett (Atar Fire) to unpack how gas released during thermal runaway turns a container into a d...

A facility with 105 synchronized fans pushing hurricane-class wind across a full-size house while a live fire... This is not science fiction - this is a real research capacity that helps us re-shape our knowledge on the full scale building ignition, fire spread, and failure. That’s the stage at IBHS, where we dig into how wind-driven fire behave differently to small-scale and how tiny choices arou...

What can you learn after processing observations across 900 severe fires? A lot. Actually, I will send you to the paper straight away: Evaluating 900 Potentially Harming Fires in Germany: Is the Prescriptive Building Code Effective? German Fire Departments Assessed Fire Safety Measures in Buildings Through On-Site Inspections  And now let's dissect this. We sit down with Björn Maiworm of the...

What do you expect from running a fire test? I would hope that it improves my state of knowledge. But do they do this? We often pursue them blindly, but it seems there is a way to do this in an informed way.  In this episode we explore a rigorous, practical way to select and design experiments by asking a sharper question: which test delivers the most decision-changing information for the least co...

A viral clip of an EV igniting was what started my worries about safety in car parks I have been designing. Are we ready for fast growing fires? Since 2019 I've learned and studied a lot, I've relaxed on some aspects of it and was able to identify they areas where a lot more engineering considerations should be placed. In this episode I would like to take you inside the engineering choic...

It is a massive effort to rewrite a national fire safety code around measurable risk, explicit targets, and cost-effectiveness. But sometimes, there are great reasons to do so. In this episode, together with Gianluca De Sanctis and Sofia Kourgiantaki we take you inside Switzerland’s sweeping reform, where a new federal law sets a maximum individual risk for life safety, ties property protection to...

Demand for the energy storage is as high as ever, and is about to triple-quadruple. The development of technology is at unprecedented phase, and even within a single project you may face different cell, battery or container generations. This pace reshapes how we think about battery energy storage safety, from enclosure design to emergency response. We sat down with Noah Ryder from the Fire and Ris...

This week, in the Fire Science Show, we host a roundtable discussion on complexities in fire safety science and engineering. Most safety failures don’t come from a single mistake—they emerge when people, technology, and institutions misalign. In an ever-changing field in which complexities just go up, we open up a debate on how to cope with that so that the entire field goes in the right direction...