1 year. This is insane the war is still going on and people are still hurt. This war in Ukraine significantly affected everyone in here, and in this episode, I get a chance to share some of my thoughts and background to the story (at least from my perspective). The story of this episode is that professor Dix was visiting Poland, and he was absolutely astonished by the situation here which did not match his expectations. On the conference he went literally 'I need to interview you on what is happ...
Feb 24, 2023•44 min
If you want to design a suppression system for a certain application, you have a lot of technical solutions to choose from and most likely a handful of codes to follow. It seems pretty straightforward for most applications, right? Well, it certainly was not like this for my today's guest and his application. The guest is Ulf Lundström of the Swedish Road Administration and his application was for road tunnels. But it is not that he just needed a sprinkler for that - he had a very specific sectio...
Feb 22, 2023•47 min•Ep. 90
There is no universal answer to the question of how law and testing regimes should be set up. Sometimes, we build up our law after a huge tragedy, making sure that the same cause will not be of harm in the future. Sometimes, we act proactively, trying to build robust solutions so that all foreseen threats are minimized... But it is never without a flaw. And even if the system is flawless, one can hardly expect today's solutions to answer the problems of the future world. But we need those laws, ...
Feb 15, 2023•56 min•Ep. 89
Modelling ignition and fire of a tree branch with some leaves can't be that much different from modelling burning timber, right? Well, that is the kind of ignorance that can backfire on you... It certainly did on me! I have honestly not imagined how complicated fires of living (and dead) vegetation may be. How different heat transfer phenomena will have the leading impact (convective heating and cooling!) and how some of the assumptions I'm very used to may be useless. I guess I should have paid...
Feb 08, 2023•53 min•Ep. 88
Performance-based engineering or the use of probabilistic methods in building design are not inventions of Fire Safety Engineering. But we sometimes tend to act like we need to 'discover' and work out everything on our own. I strongly believe this is not the best way forward. And certainly not the cheapest one... Where I see a lot of potential is the adaptation of methods and models that work in other parts of civil engineering, that could act as solutions to issues related to fire. Such a case ...
Feb 01, 2023•59 min•Ep. 87
Would you rather do 20 published experiments and take your impact factors, or make one that truly changed the world of fire science? Or maybe a different way, would you pursue something that is quick, easy and gives immediate credit over something hard, stressful and requiring maybe years to really change mainstream engineering? Sure, we all like to see ourselves as heroes, but in reality, very few of us have the courage and vision to pursue these hard-to-achieve goals. But it seems worth it. To...
Jan 25, 2023•58 min•Ep. 86
Three months ago I saw a video of some sort of an electric scooter going off in someone's residential building. That person had absolutely no chance of controlling that fire. I guess they have escaped, but it must have been severe fire damage to their home. Then, I listened to an excellent webinar by IFAB ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vir4_1qSSc ) where for the first time I've seen useful measurements of HRR in such a fire... and they are horrifying. A fire in a range of ¬1 MW is in many ca...
Jan 18, 2023•51 min•Ep. 85
Welcome to Questions & Answers session 02 covering the recent sponsorship opening in the podcast and how the podcast is turning from a hobby project to something more professional, and the summary of the 2022 listener experience survey. In this session you can find answers to the following questions: What does it mean to have podcast sponsorships for the podcast, the audience, me and the sponsors? 2:15 Summary of listener experience survey. 15:29 Types of content you would like to see in the...
Jan 16, 2023•47 min
In my first episode, I mentioned that I'm doing this podcast to preserve some amazing conversations and share them with a larger audience, as sometimes it is a huge waste of interesting thoughts that remain just between the few people participating in a talk. This part of the podcast mission is what I'm trying to achieve with today's episode. I had the privilege to be a part of an amazing discussion between fire science giants Steve Gwynne from Movement Strategies and Mike Spearpoint from OFR, w...
Jan 11, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 84
Let's start another mini-series! This time 'fire fundamentals' where we are going to learn some basics from the world's best. It is usually fascinating to do that! Not sure how you feel about it but I would kill for a chance to listen to the principles of fire science from Quintiere or Drysdale, even though I give these lectures on my own... In this first episode, I've invited dr Rory Hadden - an emerging legend of fire from the University of Edinburgh, to discuss some basics of flame and combus...
Jan 04, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 83
Fire science is often accelerated by tragedies. The same goes for the tools we are using and the methods we know. In the early 2000's we already had some great tools, in fact, it was the era where the paradigm of fire modelling shifted from zone models to emerging CFD (listen to episode 81 to learn more about this shift). But these new capabilities soon went through a significant test - a terrorist attack in New York, bringing two iconic skyscrapers to collapse. An overwhelming media turmoil. Ca...
Dec 28, 2022•42 min•Ep. 82
Has it ever crossed your mind how would our discipline look like, if we did not have Fire Dynamics Simulator? Maybe you had an opportunity to discuss CFD with colleagues from other disciplines, to find their faces in shock and awe that the fire community actually has its own, FREE AND OPEN SOURCE, validated and fully recognized solver? A testimony to the impact of FDS may be the citation count on its user guide, which has recently exceeded 5.000 citations! The FDS code is something special and o...
Dec 21, 2022•55 min•Ep. 81
Today is a great day to celebrate with Prof Ruben van Coile of Ghent University, who is most likely the first representative of Fire Safety Engineering to receive a grant within the European Research Councill Starting Grant scheme. It is not common to celebrate a grant award this much - usually, we would wait till the work gets done and we see the effects... But not here. ERC is something else. ERC is a place for the bravest proposals brought by the brightest minds of science. And even that does...
Dec 14, 2022•48 min•Ep. 80
When the flaming combustion stops and the raging inferno disappears, the environment is still far away from a stable, stationary state. The heat emitted by the fire and accumulated by the structural elements is still on the move, travelling through the members until it gets eventually dissipated. As parts of the structure get heated, some processes will occur, that may influence their load-bearing capacity and other properties. This is nothing new, we recognize this as an obvious process within ...
Dec 07, 2022•48 min
Welcome to Questions & Answers session 01 covering the topics brought up in November 2022. In this session you can find answers to the following questions: Fire resistance of joints asked by Millie Wan (answered by Piotr Turkowski) - jump to 1:41 Fire detection in car parks asked by Elena Funk - jump to 11:10 Balancing safety and architectural beauty asked by Ekonudim Friday - jump to 15:51 Comment on driving fire safety in Iran by Neda Farhoudi - jump to 21:34 Smoke control strategies for b...
Dec 05, 2022•36 min
If Dalmarnock was the reality check for fire modelling, we could call the work carried by BRE at Cardington the birthplace of Structural Fire Engineering. Welcome to episode 2 of Experiments that Changed Fire Science! In this episode dr Tom Lennon from BRE takes us to a journey through the massive experimental programmes carried at BRE Cardington facility. A former aircraft hangar turned into a testing ground for ENTIRE BUILDINGS. That is what was the most unique for the programme - instead of f...
Nov 30, 2022•52 min
Delivery of fire safety to one billion inhabitants of informal settlements cannot be done through a single solution. No magical extinguishing ball nor hyper-sensitive sensor can solve this issue. As it is not a single issue - it is dozens of overlapping problems spanning from the availability of materials, how structures are built and how the urban landscape can be planned and managed. It is related to how society is managed, what role models are presented to them and what resources they have to...
Nov 23, 2022•53 min
Welcome to a mini-series of episodes on experiments that changed fire science. In the first episode, we cover the a prioiri and posteriori modelling task within the Dalmarnock Fire Experiments programme carried out by the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. The whole experimental programme was led by prof. Jose Torrero. In this episode, we focus on two modelling tasks within the programme, that lead to a major shift in how modern modelling tools are used in fir...
Nov 16, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Dear Terrestial Fire Engineers, let me take you on a journey that will make you experience fire engineering like nothing on our planet. Because in fact, it is the fire engineering of spacecraft for their operations in a zero-gravity environment. The environment in which the most fundamental aspects of fire engineering (think about smoke cannot go up when there is no up!) are being challenged. Where fire physics is completely different, and where things that are necessary for humans (oxygen, clot...
Nov 09, 2022•57 min•Season 1Ep. 75
Intumescent coatings are not magic. They are a product of amazing engineering, a theatre of thermophysical properties that create an insulative layer that sometimes is the only thing holding fire from destroying a structure. A chemical masterpiece in which the onset of swelling is chosen so that the paint layer is soft just when the chemical compound used to foam starts releasing gasses. Sharing many features with natural carbon-made materials, they char and oxidize. And once you start modelling...
Nov 02, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 74
Long before I started the podcast, my bread and butter was to find clever ways to remove smoke from shopping malls. Actually, I like to believe I was pretty good at the job, given the fact some of the biggest projects in Eastern Europe successfully made their way through our office. At some point (after reading Roger Harrisons PhD thesis ) I figured out there is some science in the stuff we are doing in our engineering, and that day I turned into a scientist. This idea turned into passion, and p...
Oct 26, 2022•40 min
Many creators will not agree, but in some cases, copying is the highest form of admiration. And there are things in Fire Safety Engineering that are more than worthy of being copied. One of them is the famous International Masters in Fire Safety Engineering course, carried together by the Universities of Ghent, Edinburgh, Lund and a new member - Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. And from what I've just learned from one of the masterminds - Prof. Bart Merci and Prof. Eulalia Planas- they do n...
Oct 19, 2022•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 73
When thinking about 'risk' do you view it as a tool? I usually thought about it as a concept or maybe as a measure of 'how safe my building is?', but I have not really appreciated how beneficial it might be when used in such a way. Once you take it in its basic form - presentation of probabilities and consequences of fires in your buildings, you may use it to find answers to questions, that are a struggle to answer in another way. You can understand the performance of your building, its shortcom...
Oct 12, 2022•56 min
Today we talk fire resistance, but unlike you have ever heard. Join me and Dr Piotr Turkowski - two fire laboratory professionals in an honest discussion about their craft. The challenges in standardization and committee work, discoveries in laboratories that are very tough to implement in the test method design, and sometimes unscientific approaches which are necessary for a market consensus. All the challenges that make us view fire resistance in a different way than you may have. Here are som...
Oct 05, 2022•56 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Why so many researchers are spending their time tackling fire issues at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI)? What is so challenging about this? We always lived near nature, why today this emerges as one of the 'hottest' topics of fire science? As my today's guest Prof. Michael Gollner says - you need a very bad combination of weather and vegetation conditions to create a really bad fire. However, these conditions are occurring more and more often - in California they are not even considering fire...
Sep 28, 2022•59 min
What factors influence the walking speed of an occupant? Is it just their physiology and crowd density? It seems it is more complicated than that (as most things are in fire science...). Dr John Gales of York University takes me on a journey through their extremally interesting research on anthropomorphic data and movement speeds, which they have been extensively carrying through the last years. You will learn why the crowd at a football match will have a different characteristic than one attend...
Sep 21, 2022•59 min
We've felt a bit awkward about how FSE handles smoke control in corridors. If you look closely into common practices, they rarely do include impressive engineering - more often you see some 'tips and tricks' that make the CFD simulations work out and systems are accepted. Doors opening/closing in specific timeline points, heat source sizes or soot generation parameters... I agree it does not necessarily mean that all the systems are designed wrongfully, or they do not provide safety... but in fa...
Sep 14, 2022•35 min
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 episode, I'm interviewing prof. Andy Buchanan on his thoughts on fire-safe use of timber, in relation to ...
Sep 07, 2022•58 min
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 resolution for a road tunnel? But it gets better... What makes CFD more accurate? Is it better alignment with exper...
Aug 31, 2022•55 min
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 of the firefighter may be as great from the fire as from their own heat generation due to work being...
Aug 24, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 64
