There are topics in fire science that gain more attention than others. Timber in fire. Batteries. Facades. They are novel, complex, challenging and yet as engineers, we must handle them in our everyday job. But are they important? If we could create an unbiased measure of *importance* of a subject, would they get on top of the list? I'm sure they wouldn't, but I'm pretty sure the subject of today's episode would rank on the very top of that list. Danielle Antonellis is a founder of a non-profit ...
Jan 19, 2022•54 min
Have you ever heard about the hot smoke testing approach? If you had, there is a great chance you have not heard anything positive about it... From our experience, this method is often downplayed as useless, unrealistic and inconclusive. While to some extent you have to agree with the limitations, in Poland we have found a way how to turn this theatrical tool into a powerhouse of engineering. And this episode is all about this. I have invited two FSE's - Janusz Paliszek and Piotr Smardz of compa...
Jan 12, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 33
Welcome to the final episode of this year! I hope you all had a great year. For me, it was probably the most challenging, and the most rewarding year of my whole professional career. Join me in this episode recollecting the things that have happened in the show, and bringing back some of my favourite episodes of the show. Check out the topical collections at the podcast website: https://www.firescienceshow.com/ For the next two weeks, I'm on a break with my family, so the next episode will come ...
Dec 22, 2021•53 min
Can water mist be used in tunnels? I wondered that for a long time, and with every tunnel project, many questions around this issue were piling in my head. When dealing with large infrastructure projects you really need to work your way around multiple functional aspects of a system - maintenance, water and power consumption, drainage capacity, availability of elements and their certification... You would love to focus purely on the fire safety aspect of the issue, but you cannot. Unfortunately,...
Dec 15, 2021•49 min•Season 1Ep. 31
If you ever had anything to do with Fire Safety Engineering, you have most likely touched the visibility in smoke. What's an easier way to explain how bad the conditions are inside of a building than saying how much smoke was there? And what's a better way to define smoke than saying how far can you see? It's brilliant. We have agreed (unwillingly, somewhere in the '60s) that if visibility is kept at a good'ish level of 10 m or more, conditions inside are fine. And we know how to calculate it, s...
Dec 08, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 30
This is not a fun episode. It starts with a tragedy, that fueled a whole field of research. Continues into disbelief, that one aspect of fire safety can be at the same chosen as the sole foundation of fire safety within a branch of engineering, and at the same time at a pretty low, clearly insufficient level... And then comes the true shocker - solutions exist and we just don't use them. Because of, who knows why. An unknown force... Ok, I have spoiled you a bit, but it is absolutely worth heari...
Dec 01, 2021•47 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Have you ever been fascinated by the capabilities of AI? Did you wonder how the heck can an algorithm beat humans in repetitive tasks? Or make multi-level correlations that we would never be able to figure out? I was as well. And I felt the urge to learn more about this technology, in a way to not be left out when everyone plays with their new toys... But at the same time, I felt this feeling of overwhelm and confusion about this technology. What exactly is it, where to start... Then the wall of...
Nov 24, 2021•56 min
If you have ever learned about the compartment fire dynamics framework, have tried zone modelling or any kind of fire modelling, you have probably noticed that as the compartments get bigger, the less uniform conditions inside are. At some size, the flashover or a "single-zone" model theories just break, MQH equation does not give a reasonable solution and the fire seems not capable of growing to a huge size... But yet, they destroy buildings. Local fire exposure may be damaging to structural el...
Nov 17, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Thanks to the courtesy of the International Water Mist Association I have been invited to the recent conference held in Warsaw. The conference was a two-day event focused on water mist technology. In fact, it was the 20th meeting of this kind, and in a way special, as it was the first at which the new European standard EN 14972-1, which is a cornerstone for the future growth of this technology. You can learn more about the standard here . It was a huge pleasure to participate in the conference, ...
Nov 10, 2021•56 min
In Episode 18 we have touched on the important topic of fire performance of engineered wood and its wide use in the modern built environment. Today, we follow up on this subject with Dr Felix Wiesner from the University of Queensland. We leave the (important) topic of compartment fire dynamics and focus on what happens inside the wood in the fire. And there is much more going on than I have initially thought... The transport of moisture, weakening bonds at the glue line and connections, complex ...
Nov 03, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Who is a Fire Safety Engineer? And when do you become one? How do you know the person on the other side of the table at the project meeting has the necessary competencies to judge fire safety solutions of a building you design? That is a problem with (a) the definition of the profession and (b) the definition of the core competencies related to the profession. And both of these issues are close to the heart of my guest, Jimmy Jönsson, Director at JVVA in Spain and a member of SFPE Board of Direc...
Oct 27, 2021•59 min
Risk as a concept is well established in modern Performance-Based Design in Fire Safety Engineering. However, it comes in many flavours - from a simple calculation of consequences vs probability, through indexing methods and using some arbitrary measures (number of fatalities, cost of damage etc.). Most of these methods focus on the value or threshold of the risk... while my today's guests seem to focus much more on the process itself. Today I'm happy to host Dr Jaime Cadena Gomez (UQ, Transurba...
Oct 20, 2021•57 min
https://firelab.berkeley.edu/ this is the place you need to go! Ignition at different slope angles. Firebrand spotting. Fire whirls. What does connect these various fire phenomena? They are all driven by fluid dynamics and can happen only in very particular flow conditions. To define and understand these conditions... well that is a bit longer story that I will unravel with Prof. Michael J. Gollner of the University of California, Berkeley. In Episode 14 we have gone on a journey through scales ...
Oct 13, 2021•55 min•Season 1Ep. 22
It is hard for us, fire safety engineers, to talk to firefighters on how to do their job... Probably we even shouldn't, as we have no idea how it is to truly go there into the heat and battle fire to save lives. But it does not mean we should not care. Firefighters are important actors in the fire safe world, and we cannot design buildings as if they were not. In the end, the probability of you being in a fire is fairly low, while for a firefighter this P = 1. Our decisions shape the building en...
Oct 05, 2021•58 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Do you sometimes feel that fire safety engineering is not making a footprint as it should? With all our knowledge, models, technology...why do huge fires exist? Why fire is such a threat to billions of humans? In today's episode, I'm hosting a guest who spent three decades researching what performance-based fire safety engineering is, and what it could be. And I'm not completely sure if I like the answers I got from this talk. However, based on my experience of 17 interviews with world-class fir...
Sep 29, 2021•1 hr 13 min
There is plenty of fire engineers who think they are modelling human behaviour... Some claim they can do it... And there is very, very few who actually did and succeeded with it. One of them is today's guest, Dr Erica Kuligowski of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. After two decades of groundbreaking research at NIST, Erica has moved to Australia to seek new challenges related primarily to the mass evacuation of people during bushfire events. She presents her unique views on modelling hum...
Sep 21, 2021•58 min
Engineered timber is on a trajectory to become the construction material of the future. However, on that pathway there stands the fire issue. Wood burns, it is inevitable. This is something we must accept, and learn to work around. Common approach – determination of a char profile and the “healthy” section has its limitations, especially when applied to CLT products in which one could expect the glue line failure. And all of this is the topic of my todays discussion with Dr Danny Hopkin of OFR C...
Sep 15, 2021•1 hr 1 min
When you think about battling wildfires, what is the image you see in front of your eyes? Probably an air tanker (at least that was what I saw...). After this interview, your optics will change about 180 degrees. Dr Cathelijne Stoof explained to me why strategies focused ultimately on fire resistance and suppression are deemed to fail, and why we need to learn to manage the risks in our forests. Through a combination of landscape management, efficient ground firefighting, aerial support and soci...
Sep 08, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 17
Evacuation modelling is paramount in accounting for the human aspect in our fire modelling. But how is it developing? Where are we with our tools, and where are we heading with them? What are the most profound challenges related to the evacuation modelling? To answer these questions I have invited two renowned experts on evacuation modelling. Professor Enrico Ronchi from Lund University in Sweden and Professor Ruggiero 'Rino' Lovreglio from Massey University in New Zealand. Together we try to fi...
Sep 01, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Have you ever wondered who truly has the most power over the fire safety of a building? In my opinion, the answer is very simple - the Architect. This is due to two reasons. First is that the architect can affect the building shape, size, compartmentation, location of the openings in the building - things that are fundamental to the compartment fire dynamics. The second reason is that they make the decisions at the most infant stage of the building construction. When everything is reversible, an...
Aug 25, 2021•56 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Have you ever wondered how is a fire of a match or candle different from a wildfire? Or maybe rather, why is it different? What is it, that makes the fires at different scales behave in such a different manner? What are the phenomena that drive these fires, and are these the same phenomena across the scales? These are the questions I had in mind when starting the interview with a rising star of Wildfire Science – Dr Sara McAllister of the USDA Forest Service. Together with Sara we go into a jour...
Aug 18, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 14
We are living in a kind of weird time, where the most complex tool we have is at the same time the most commonly used (and abused one). The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling has brought us amazing capabilities in solving the flows within fires. But this power comes at a price - knowledge, resources, time... Sometimes we lack some of these (or all) and we turn the power tool into a generator of beautiful images that are hardly any representation of the physics of the fire... In this ep...
Aug 11, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 13
In this episode, I had the pleasure and privilege to host dr Kees Both, the Technical Manager of Standards & Regulations in Etexgroup. Kees wanted to become a suspension bridge engineer, but his route went through a fire lab, and as he said - once you go into a fire lab, there is no way out. From a scientist, he has "evolved" into a research manager, project manager and someone, who has a significant impact on the shape of the standards and legislation in Europe. Kees is also the former Pres...
Aug 04, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 12
What is the single most measured thing in fire science? The answer is easy - temperature. We use it everywhere - from learning material properties in TGA's to expressing conditions in compartment fires. We use it at the same time to define exposure conditions for our structures and the acceptance criteria within them. We even use it in evacuation studies to define the tenability criteria for occupants... We measure temperature. Everywhere and all the time. But is it really the thing we are looki...
Jul 28, 2021•44 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Did you know that the standard temperature-time curve, which is the underpinning of the fire resistance of assemblies, is over 100 years old? Once you know that, you cannot stop but think about how this affects modern construction works. In this episode, I'm interviewing dr John Gales from York University, who has spent over a decade studying the historical origins of fire testing and the standard curve. John has found some missing links and narratives and has also done a pretty good job confron...
Jul 21, 2021•57 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Why do we take certain decisions during an evacuation process? How do we choose the evacuation route? These are often affected by cognitive biases, which is the main theme of today's episode. With Dr Michael Kinsey we will discuss how biases can be used to understand known behaviours and model human behaviour in a more realistic way. A lot of focus is placed on the evacuation modelling, and how the decision-making processes are implemented in the computer models... And in the end, we talk a bit ...
Jul 13, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Zone modelling is a technique introduced in 1970's and 80's that has changed fire science. In my personal opinion, along with oxygen calorimetry and the development of FDS it may have been the most impactful tool of fire science. This is why I think its shameful it does not receive the same recognition today. With Colleen we go deep into the zone models, discussing the tool itself and the ways to adapt it to current needs. You will learn how zone models evolved, and what makes them really useful...
Jul 07, 2021•53 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Everyone is talking about AI, but how can we really use it in fire safety engineering and firefighting? Prof Xinyan Huang of HK PolyU will explain his research in this field, and we can consider it as a time travel to the future. We touch on the ideas of AI and machine learning, and what does it really do (and what it does not do). We also investigate Xinyan's most recent research where AI was successfully applied to investigate the location of a fire in a tunnel and predict the smoke layer heig...
Jun 29, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 7
In Episode 6, our host, dr Wojciech Wegrzynski, explains his experiences with modelling rapidly growing fires in car parks. Such fire growth may be typical for EV fires that originate in battery and pose a different set of challenges compared to "traditional" design fires used for car parks. The height of the car park is discussed as the variable that has the largest impact on the overall safety of the facility. I discuss the aspects to consider when analysing the safety of a car park for electr...
Jun 23, 2021•51 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Today I've talked to Roeland Bisschop, Project Manager in RISE, about his first-hand experience with battery fires. Roeland explained to me how do battery fires look from a scientific perspective, and how my perspective was kind of skewed by viral online videos. I've learnt a lot about fire propagation and products, as well as how to deal with fires that occured. This was a great talk, and I'm sure it will benefit many Fire Safety Engineers out there, who have to deal with this major issue with ...
Jun 16, 2021•54 min•Season 1Ep. 5
