Fire Science Show

I wonder if we will be ever able to say: we know exactly how to build fire-safe buildings with mass timber.  However that day may never come, each day of research brings us a little bit closer to achieving this goal. And some days - like the one in which Andy Buchanan and Birgit Östman published their open access handbook on fire-safe use timber, we definitely leap towards success! In today's...

Will a higher resolution mesh make my CFD more accurate? That is a harmless question, and most of us would tend toward 'I guess yeah'. But let us try and unpack this. Into atoms! What does higher resolution mean? How exactly solver deals with increased spatial discretization and what are the exact consequences of that? What is a high resolution for a tiny orifice and what is a high resol...

This amount of heat flux for this amount of time, routine conditions, check, done. This is how I used to do my engineering and tenability assessment related to heat stress... up till today when prof Denisse Smith and prof Gavin Horn took me on a bumpy journey into the physiology of humans in fire conditions and in personal protective equipment (PPE). It is astonishing, that the stress on the body...

Do we need another fire handbook? If so, what handbook would that be? I guess a question like this must have gone through Brian Meachams' mind when he got the idea for a handbook of fire and environment. And he got a brilliant co-editor - Margaret McNamee to support him in this tough work. The effect - a complete piece on the environmental effects of fires - but beyond just smoke and contamin...

It does not matter if you hate or love BIM, does not matter if you use it daily or have no idea what it is... Building Information Modelling will be an important part of our engineering future and we better get used to it.  In this episode, I talk to Peter Thompson of GHD, who had previously worked at Autodesk as a Revit developer, and prof. Ruggiero Lovreglio, a teacher of computer methods in des...

The relation between ventilation conditions and fire severity is quite a fundamental one. You don't even have to be a fire safety engineer to realize that more air means a bigger fire. But how does air get into the compartment fire in the first place? Through broken windows of course! And here we come to the subject of today's episode. Because with all the considerable improvements in gl...

[March 2023 update] The Thesis PDF is finally available! Check it here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369141515_Fire_risk_associated_with_photovoltaic_installations_on_flat_roof_constructions_-_Experimental_analysis_of_fire_spread_in_semi-enclosures If a PV panel is fire safe, and the roof is fire safe, what is the outcome of a panel placed on the roof? Not a great surprise that merging...

How much the fire scene at households has changed over the last 30 years? Why modern furniture burns worse than one made with wood, cotton and other natural materials? And what does that mean to firefighting? What challenges do modern firefighters face fighting residential fires... There is so many questions to be asked about residential fires, and in this episode, I answer a lot of them with the...

Have you wondered how fire science started? But I mean the real real start... not 1666 one, nor the one when we've started to build furnaces... The start when the first evolutionary ancestor of homo sapiens figured out this warm bright thing could be used to process food. The start when this bright thing was protected and used intentionally. The bright thing that was so important for our kind...

The subject of structural fire engineering was long overdue in the podcast schedule. But once I finally got it on my agenda, I made sure to interview one of the very best there are  - prof Thomas Gernay of John Hopkins University. Not only a structural engineer and researcher, but also one of the developers of SAFIR® - one of most popular structural fire engineering numerical codes out there. In t...

How does being a volunteer firefighter improve your abilities to do Performance-Based Design (PBD) and how your knowledge in PBD may translate to firefighting? That is not a question you can ask to every fire protection engineer, but luckily - David Stacy is one who can answer that fully. Tapping into his unique skillset and career path I try to extract answers on how does one translate firefighti...

I once said the future looks stupid... but after this discussion with Arnold Dix, I know - future is exciting. And for Fire Safety Engineers and others involved in fire protection - the future seems to be super exciting! In this episode, we let go and try to discuss the future tech in the world of tunnelling. From autonomous vehicles in tiny (and seems a bit dangerous) tunnels, McDonnaldization of...

A few episodes ago I called for better communication in fire safety. And in this episode, tunnel fire safety legend Prof. Arnold Dix is answering that, by teaching us the ways of the 'sustainability' talk - how to communicate better having the global sustainability goals in mind? But it is not only a way of communication. It is a mindset. And it is a powerful one, leading to a rethink of...

It has been one year since I started this show. I've promised you that we will learn Fire Safety Engineering together, and today comes a great time to reflect on some lessons learnt. In this episode, I will take you on a short journey through some most insightful moments in the show, that allowed me to identify the number one skill needed to thrive as a fire protection engineer. What is that...

With this lifestyle, this was inevitable... due to a busy week I had to move the schedule a bit and was pretty sure I will get away with it by recording a solo episode... but my throat has decided otherwise and I kind of cannot record a full episode. I need a week off to heal this up before the 1-year anniversary episode that I care a lot about! In the meantime, please try and enjoy some excellent...

You have seen these lovely evacuation simulations, the ones with a bunch of agents moving together or clumping at an exit. Ones that we use to determine ASET condition, and which are present in almost every large PBD project... Maybe even you are running such simulations. So, with that experience in mind - have you ever wondered if what you see makes sense. We all feel that humans in groups behave...

In this show, we often discuss how fire science can help firefighters. Today we drop the UNO reverse card and figure out what firefighters actually need from fire science. And for that, I've got a perfect person to talk to - a firefighter, commander, instructor and a fire scientist. Szymon Kokot of the Nidzica Fire Brigade and CFBT Poland  With this talk, I wanted to achieve two answers. How...

Episode 50! Time to celebrate, and for this one we have a surprise. A mysterious host takes over the show to interview a wind and fire modelling celebrity... Ok, this should be enough to not reveal everything once the show notes get auto-posted on all social media :) I am super happy for multiple reasons. You guys were with me 50 times on my way to share fire science with everyone who wants to lis...

So we all know batteries burn... but do we know what exactly does burn? What is inside this tiny metal cylinder that scares so many of us? We try to understand it a bit more with Dr Francesco Restuccia of Kings College London, who is an expert in battery fire safety and self-heating. And this combination of skills gave him a unique view of the challenges of fire safety of batteries - especially th...

Did you know first car parks were built for electric vehicles? Or what clever techniques can be used to model the spread of fire between vehicles? Or what challenges scientists meet burning vehicles, and why pneumatic suspension makes stuff more interesting... These (and much much more) are the things you learn by inviting Mike Spearpoint of the OFR for a lovely chat about design fires in car park...

Pressurization is a common strategy for protecting spaces against the infiltration of smoke. However, the solution has a kind-of bad press as "not-working" or "incapable to meet its design goals". We know, that the systems are as good as their design, and in this episode with my guest, Grzegorz Sypek, we try to bust some myths around PDS systems. We touch on the important desig...

This week we do something funny - a crossover episode with the host of the Fire Code Tech podcast - Gus Gagliardi. We end up discussing the paths of fire safety engineers, from school to specialized roles in engineering companies, and the challenges associated with that.   We hope you liked this twist to the podcast, and maybe discovered a new show to follow up! If you want to hear a familiar voic...

How does one decide when a building is fire safe? That is a real hell of a question to answer! Is it when no harm can occur? But such a condition can never be fulfilled... there is always a meteor waiting around the corner to fall into your building! So if some situations can occur for which we cannot prepare, when do we decide we are 'safe enough'?  This is the tough question we try to...

Since Episode 6, the fire safety of battery systems was not very much visible in the show - a good time to change that! And we do this with a  true legend of fire safety - Ofodike Ezekoye. In the last year, I have learnt a lot about battery systems, which did not make me more afraid. Entirely opposite - the more I know, the more confident I am in fire science and engineers finding solutions for an...

It is always a pleasure to interview a true legend of fire safety. And when the topic of the interview is their thoughts on neglected areas of our discipline, based on almost five decades of experience? This must end up great! And it did (IMHO). Please join me and prof. Vyto Babrauskas in discovering what are the parts of fire science that are in need of research. What are some obvious solutions,...