Fire Science Show

Wildfire modelling is quite complicated when you wish to integrate different fuel packages with different properties in 'real' environmental conditions while managing the transition to/from smouldering. We have a model for each, but how do we make them work in unison without relying too much on their users' skills? This is a subject for a good research grant... a very big one. And this is something 'we' just got!

A fire scientist from King's College London, Dr Francesco Restuccia, has just secured an ERC grant for his innovative project on wildfire modelling. The project name is Wildfires and Climate Change: Physics-Based Modelling of Fire Spread in a Changing World.

In this podcast episode, we will discuss his current focus on developing physics-based models that promise to enhance our understanding of wildfire dynamics. We also focus on Francesco's current experience in batteries and how that experience translates to the work he is carrying out in the wildfires.

Throughout the episode, we explore the diverse range of models that predict wildfire behaviour, from straightforward empirical approaches to intricate physics-based simulations. We dive into the complexities of balancing ease of use with accuracy and discuss the exciting potential of reduced-order models that blend empirical data with physical insights. Dr. Restuccia offers a unique perspective on the challenges of automating complex models for broader applications and the necessity of identifying fire regimes to ensure precision is not compromised.

Dr. Restuccia also shares invaluable insights into securing an ERC grant, guiding aspiring researchers. From refining research ideas into a cohesive project to preparing for the competitive interview process, his experience underscores the importance of mentorship and strategic planning. We wrap up with a look at the future possibilities his research holds for fire safety engineering, inviting listeners to explore the transformative impact of advanced wildfire modelling on a global scale.

The grant description can be found here:  https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101161183

Do you have questions or want to send out your CV? The man told me to place his e-mail here... so here it is: [email protected]

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

You are not supposed to use the word 'panic' in the context of human behaviour in fires, yet this episode contains 196 instances of it. Why? because we try to get to the bottom of the thing! Can panic be both a myth and a reality?

Join us as we challenge the age-old narratives of panic in emergencies with our distinguished guest, Professor Daniel Nilsson, from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. We unravel the misconceptions surrounding human behaviour during fires, spotlighting the harmful effects of outdated myths perpetuated by media and literature. By debunking these myths, we aim to reshape fire safety engineering, focusing on realistic human reactions and informed decision-making.

Our conversation takes you across cultural landscapes, from the Western world to the Soviet Union, questioning national claims of panic susceptibility and the portrayal of panic as a contagious force. Challenging the historical context, we try to figure out what panic is once you apply the scientific method to understand it.

We also try to assess historical events like the Victoria Tower evacuation and the Love Parade tragedy, we underscore how engineering failures, not irrational behaviour, often lead to crowd disasters. Professor Nilsson and I delve into the psychology of decision-making during evacuations, emphasising the power of clear communication to prevent chaos and save lives.

Finally, we reflect on the profound research of Quarantelli, who redefined panic through thousands of disaster case studies, revealing the complexity of human responses in crises. We explore how cultural contexts influence perceived panic behaviour by differentiating between non-rational and irrational actions. We aim to enlighten fire safety professionals and the broader audience on the importance of replacing the myth of panic with empathy and evidence-based strategies, fostering a safer and more understanding approach to emergency responses.

Further reading?
Sure.
Daniel's paper in SFPE Europe magazine - is panic a myth or reality?
Proloux and Sime paper where they challanged the limiting of information (1991)

And if you really got into this, Jonathan Sime's PhD

Also, a ton of material on Human Behaviour and evacuation is waiting for you in the Uncovered Witness project!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

The Grenfell Tower tragedy has triggered a Public Inquiry (which just published their final report), and concurrently - a review of the UK Building Regulations and Fire Safety. The latter task was given to Dame Judith Hackitt, a former Head of the Health and Safety Executive and a chemical engineer.

In this interview Dame Judith Hackitt lends her voice to a pressing dialogue on fire safety reform following the Grenfell Tower tragedy. She uncovers the systemic flaws that allowed such a disaster to occur and stresses the urgent need for a cultural shift in safety practices, beyond mere regulatory compliance. By dissecting the UK's Building Safety Act, we discuss the prioritization of life safety over property protection, particularly within vulnerable residential zones. This conversation not only addresses disparities between residential and commercial building regulations but urges a reevaluation of how safety standards are applied globally.

The episode further explores the inadequacy of outdated fire safety frameworks in the context of modern architecture. Dame Hackitt provides insights into the necessity of involving competent fire engineers early in the design process and the importance of a holistic approach to fire risk assessment. With a new regulatory regime shifting responsibility onto duty holders, the onus is on architects, constructors, and engineers to prove safety from the onset. We highlight the growing demand for skilled fire safety professionals and the need for collaboration and transparency, setting a performance-based precedent for future safety measures.

As we navigate these necessary changes, the discussion underscores the broader implications for the construction industry, including architects, designers, and product manufacturers. We delve into the challenges of adopting a new regulatory mindset, inspired by global practices and insights from esteemed reviews. Dame Hackett's perspectives advocate for industry-led guidance and innovation, stressing the potential for alliances to drive the evolution of fire safety standards. This transformative dialogue serves as a clarion call for heightened accountability and a collective pursuit of excellence within the construction landscape.

If you would like to learn about the regulatory review, please read the Dame Hackitt's final report.

If you would like a scientific commentary to this review, please refer to this paper by Spinardi and Law.

Some of the changes to the regulatory system were also discussed in the Episode 102 of the Fire Science Show about the changing role of architects in the system.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

AI is changing the world. But can artificial intelligence truly revolutionize fire safety engineering? In this episode I took out my crystal ball, and tried to find answers in what aspects of fire engineering we could truly see a revolutionary impact of AI, and where it is more a disturbing gadget with no real application... 

Overall, working in the space for many years, and having talked with many luminaries of the use of AI, I would say my expectations are toned down a lot. I am still excited, but I've also learnt that really good AI applications require exceptional knowledge and resources, often at a level not accessible in fire science. While the building blocks are there, we may be short in the data, processing power or knowledge to truly apply it. At the same time, as AI became a buzzword for novelty, a lot of people pursue very simple AI applications with extraordinary claims - something that kind of triggers and annoys me...

In this episode I try to give my opinion about the use of AI in:

• supporting fire modelling
• writing and reporting (engineering and in science)
• data processing
• predicting fire phenomena
• studying fire phenomena
• material properties
• fire testing and legislation

Each of those I've ranked on an arbitrary scale of 
1 - b-s. 
2 - not too excited
3 - a good use of AI
4 - very exciting use of AI
5 - paradigm shifting use of AI

Which got the highest rank? Listen to the episode to find by yourself :)

In the episode I refer a lot to the previous episodes of the Fire Science Show in which AI technology was discussed. You can listen to those in the AI/ML section of the podcast, find them all here: https://www.firescienceshow.com/category/ai-ml/

Big thanks to the inspirational guests and my close friends that helped me clear my mind on AI, especially to MZ Naser, Jakub Bielawski, Mike Spearpoint, Danny Hopkin, Matt Bonner, Xinyan Huang, Michael Kinsey and Mike Stromgren! 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

CFD is the most talked-over subject in the Fire Science Show. There are two reasons for that: one, it is interesting and relevant for so many of the Audience, and two, it's something I do for a living. 

There is also another reason: there are a lot of ideas and concepts of how CFD could be used "better", yet I struggle to see them make an impact in the world of practical engineering. I would love to see the CFD being used in fire as it is in aerospace or Formula1 industries, yet, there are some struggles and bottlenecks that prevent that. 

In this podcast episode, I am trying to narrow down the issues and what breakthroughs are necessary to enable scalable CFD analyses for the future. We could get so much more out of our simulations if we fully benefit from the computational power revolution and pursue new data processing methods. The latter are discussed in-depth, showcasing our newest developments at the ITB.
 
Recommended Fire Science Show episodes:

• Fire Fundamentals pt 7 - CFD simulations in fire 
• Fire Fundamentals pt 11 - Boundary conditions in CFD
• Episode 13 with Wolfram Jahn on Use and abuse of CFD
• Episode 81 with Kevin McGrattan on the origins of FDS
• Episode 167 with Jonathan Hodges on simulating fire effects and growth

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

One could argue full-scale experiments on fire phenomena are the most enriching for our knowledge as the fire community. The costs associated with them and logistical nightmares of organizing them make them an uncommon sight. However, in an instance where we reach the boundaries of our knowledge, they are necessary to progress further. 

That was the case of the research programme carried out by the OFR, in the umbrella of Structural Timber Association Special Interest Group (SIG) - CLT compartment fire behaviour, including the industrial partners: Binderholtz, KLH and Stora Enso, Henkel and Fermacell. Two large experimental packages of that collaboration ended up in my laboratory, and we got to test our hypothesis and progress our approach to designing mass timber through experiments.

In this podcast episode, Dr Danny Hopkin makes a comeback to the show to give us insight into the observations and conclusions of those very large research programmes. We focus on how findings relate to the current design paradigm, and in which areas the approach has shifted. Following the evolution of the experiment itself, we discuss the changes in the fire behaviour as less and less surfaces were encapsulated, and some problems with partial protection that emerged as a consequence. Finally, we cover topics such as delamination, self-extinction and external flame from mass timber buildings – all important considerations for a designer.

If you would like to learn more about the experiments we have done, please go to the research papers:

• Hopkin D., et al. Full-Scale Fire Experiments on Cross-Laminated Timber Residential Enclosures Featuring Different Lining Protection Configurations
• Hopkin D., et al. Large-Scale Enclosure Fire Experiments Adopting CLT Slabs with Different Types of Polyurethane Adhesives: Genesis and Preliminary Findings
• Hopkin D., et al. Implications Of A Down-stand Beam On The Ceiling Flame Extension Characteristics In A Large-scale Clt Enclosure Fire Experiment

Or the STA document library.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

I approach modelling water mist with caution. Not that I don't understand it, but because I lack clarity in the goals and objectives, as well I'm usually aware I may not deliver the expectations of my clients in terms of the physical phenomena I am capturing... And I'm not the only one like this. In this podcast episode I explore the world of water mist with Dr Max Lakkonen from IFAB, who has just been chosen as the new President of the International Water Mist Association (IWMA),

Max dives into the history and evolution of water mist technology, explaining how a catastrophic fire on a Scandinavian Star Cruise liner 35 years ago led to its commercial introduction. Discover why understanding droplet size is crucial for optimising water mist systems and why it's important to understand these systems with a clear understanding of objectives to achieve effective fire safety solutions.

Max discusses the necessity of extensive experimental testing to account for different nozzle types, pressures, and flow rates, highlighting the complexity involved in designing these systems. We also touch on the importance of industry collaboration and the role of organizations like IWMA in bridging the gap between specialized water mist companies and fire safety engineers, ultimately ensuring the dissemination of crucial information and best practices.

Dive into the intricacies of CFD modelling in fire safety engineering, especially for water mist systems. Max brings to light the limitations of relying solely on CFD without experimental validation and the benefits of using CFD for preliminary studies to save both time and costs. We address the unique challenges of modelling cooling effects, fire suppression in tunnels, and the need for best practices and guidelines in fire safety engineering. Listen in to gain valuable insights from one of the leading experts in the field and understand why practical application often trumps academic theory in real-world fire control scenarios.

Most importantly, the CFD Position Paper we have promised to you is available to download now!!!

Make sure to visit the International Water Mist Association site for more resources and the necessary connection with the industry.

The cover image was captured at the Baltic Fire Laboratory during ITB-FRISSBE Summer School. If you want to see it live, pay attention to our announcements on LinkedIn, and perhaps we can see each other next summer!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

What happens to controlled doors when a fire is detected in the building? They unlock. Elevators? They go down. People are guided somewhere, and the fire strategy is executed. As it should.

But what if the real threat is not the fire itself? What if the real threat is using the fire as a decoy or, worse, as a tool? What if the threat has intelligence, motives and the ability to adapt to the actions of our systems?

Now, this is a frightening scenario. A scenario in which the security objectives could be much more important than fire ones. But we do not design our fire safety systems for such a possibility. Likewise, the security layer affects 'our' design by interfering with evacuation pathways or locking parts of the facility that we would like to keep open.

In this episode, Steve Gwynne and Aoife Hunt from Movement Strategies take me on a journey of integrating fire safety and security objectives in the building design. Learn how ingress, circulation, and egress must align with safety and operational procedures, and discover the potentially catastrophic outcomes when fire safety engineers overlook security aspects.

As we rethink traditional fire safety strategies in the face of modern threats, this episode explores the intersection of fire safety and security like never before. We discuss increasing fire recognition as a weapon and the necessity for integrating advanced detection systems and human behaviour training. Together with Steve and Aoife, we strongly advocate for a unified approach to building safety that leverages the strengths of both disciplines, making our environments safer and more resilient. 

Here, I would like to direct you towards two resources of my own:

• Fire Fundamentals, episode 6, covers how the building responds to a fire. Please listen to this episode but with your new 'security' view in mind. It will give you a new sense of what we do in our buildings for fire.
• The entire Uncovered Witness - Fire Science Revelations podcast that I am producing. In the eight episodes, we go very deep into human evacuation in a building, from regulations through building systems and management to human behaviour and decision-making. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

EVs are becoming more of a 'normal' part of fire safety engineering rather than an 'exotic problem'. I've invited two colleagues from Thornton Tomasetti - Ali Ashrafi and Pawel Woelke, to discuss what this engineering looks like. 

In the episode, we discuss insights into how fire risks differ between electric and internal combustion engine vehicles and why the focus is shifting from cars to more pressing hazards like electric scooters and energy storage systems. We explore the different approaches in the US and Europe, discussing the importance of performance-based solutions and timely detection to manage fire risks effectively. W We'll also discuss the critical role of ongoing education and adaptation in the fire safety industry as technology evolves.

An important aspect is the practical strategies for mitigating fire spread and explosion hazards in vehicle design and parking facilities. From the significance of separation distances and sprinklers to the potential dangers of gas accumulation, our conversation dives deep into the intricacies of ensuring a safer environment for both people and property. We also highlight the importance of early planning and thoughtful design in integrating EV infrastructure into building designs, and how real-world incidents shape our understanding and approach to EV safety. 

If you would like further reading, please refer to the phase 2 report from NFPA at
https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/fire-protection-research-foundation/projects-and-reports/modern-vehicle-hazards-in-parking-garages-vehicle-carriers

You may also be interested in the investigation of the explosion hazards researched by FSRI - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016236124019677?via%3Dihub=
 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Fires in the waste industry are not discussed much unless one sees a giant smoke plume in the media, followed by advice to close your windows. In these (rare?) cases, we remind ourselves of the massive industry related to storing, sorting and recycling garbage, and the obvious environmental hazards such fires pose.

From 2017 to 2020, Poland experienced a challenging time with fires at landfills, primarily caused by arson or negligence. A bit later, when I was working on my chapter for the Handbook of Fire and the Environment, I saw Ragni Fjellgaard Mikalsen working on hers about waste fires, and I found that work very relevant and useful. Finally, it is time to dive deeper into the subject, and hence, I have Ragni on the podcast, and we talk about garbage!

Her expertise in smouldering fires and collaborations with Norwegian authorities bring invaluable insights into the unique fire risks faced by waste handling, processing, and storage facilities. From outdoor landfills to indoor recycling centres, Ragni shares how accurate fire reporting and comprehensive data analysis can significantly enhance fire safety protocols in this crucial sector. She introduces us to the "traffic light" system to illustrate the risks at different facilities.

Balancing ideal waste storage practices with economic realities is no small feat. In this episode, Ragni discusses the intricacies of managing waste storage, from controlling moisture and temperature in storage piles to proper sorting practices to minimise impurities in incoming waste. We also cover the urgent need for governmental intervention and innovative insurance solutions to tackle the high-hazard waste mismanagement issues in places like Poland.

And here are the promised further reading resources from Ragni:

Link to waste paper: 

Fires in waste facilities: Challenges and solutions from a Scandinavian perspective, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2020.103023 

Link to Handbook: 

Chapter 13 on Mitigation Strategies for Waste Fires in Handbook of Fire and the Environment: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-94356-1

The Norwegian info is based on work by RISE Fire Research in Norway: 

• R.F. Mikalsen, K. Glansberg, K. Storesund, S. Ranneklev, Branner I Avfallsanlegg (Fires in Waste Storage) RISE-report 2019:61, RISE Fire Research, Trondheim,2019. https://risefr.no/media/publikasjoner/upload/2019/rise-rapport-2019-61-branner-i-avfallsanlegg.pdf

The Swedish info is based on work by RISE in Sweden: 

• A. Lønnermark, P. Blomqvist. Emissions from Fires in Electrical and Electronics Waste ISSN 0284-5172, SP report 2005:42, SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, Sweden, 2005. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn¼urn%3Anbn%3Ase%3Ari%3Adiva-4695 .
• A. Lønnermark, H. Persson, P. Blomqvist, W. Hogland, Biobränslen Och Avfall - Brands€akerhet i Samband Med Lagring (Biofuels and solid waste – fire safety in connection with storage) SP Report, SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, Sweden, 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ase%3Alnu%3Adiva-3575
• A. Lønn

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode we talk with Jonathan Hodges of the Jensen Hughes on his experience with using advanced modelling in the realm of fire safety engineering. Jonathan sheds light on how the modelling is used at various Jensen Hughes offices around the world, highlighting interesting differences they see across their practice. 

The core of the talk revolves around using CFD for modeling the consequences of fires, versus using it to assess the fire growth. While the first one is a commonly practiced in offices across the world, the growth part is kind of a challenge. We go into how CFD can help us develop better fire scenarios, and how they can be further improved through an influx of experimental data. 

In the final part of the talk we are looking ahead, as we explore the transformative potential of AI-driven CFD surrogate modeling and GPU-based solvers, including the possibility conducting real-time CFD simulations without the prohibitive computational costs—this could soon be a reality. 

As we discuss these innovations, it becomes clear how they could impact fire safety engineering globally, providing deeper insights into fire dynamics and more robust engineering solutions. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In the everchanging world every now and then we get a new driver, that dictates most of our choices. In the current built environment and building industry, carbon dioxide feels like such a driver. We don't like it, we want to get rid of it... One way is to sequester or store large amounts of CO2 in our buildings. Ways to do that - more obvious is mass timber, but thats not the only thing. Let's talk bio-based insulation.

In this episode I've invited Patrick Sudhoff, now from DBI but the research was carried at University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal. Patrick carried his PhD on the smouldering fires in bio-based insulation, and thus has built a good knowledge base around the topic. We discuss all the types of different bio-based insulations, what they are made of and where they are used. First we cover the drivers and need for the new material, as well as the benefits it brings to the table. We discuss the challanges with the onset of smouldering, transition to flaming and spread of fire through the structure. 

List of projects that were related to the subject and discussed in the podcast:

• „More than just insulation additional benefits of insulation materials made from renewable raw materials “, 6 different research areas: fire protection, soundproofing, thermal insulation, sustainability analysis, moisture protection, emissions, 2016-2020, 12 institutes plus external partners
• “PyroProBiD – Development of a smoldering prognosis model for bio-based insulation materials”, 2020-2023 (my PhD project), Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg & University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg Stendal
•  “HoBraTec – Optimization of firefighting procedures for multistorey timber buildings", 2022-2024, Fire Brigade Hamburg & University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal & Institute of Fire and Disaster Protection Heyrothsberge

Some literature I got from Patrick:

•  This poster gives you a brief summary of the latest challenges and solutions regarding the fire behavior of bio-based insulation - http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.18735.14241

Further reading:

• Sudhoff, P. (2024): “Modeling the Fire Behavior of Bio-Based Insulation Materials”, Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Fire Safety of Facades 2024: 10-12 June 2024. Lund, Sweden, ISBN 978-91-89971-04-2
• Steen-Hansen, A., Fjellgaard M., Ehrlenspiel, R. (2023): “Smouldering fire test methods - Documenting the potential for smouldering fires in thermal insulation”, Report number: FRIC Report D3.1-2023.06, November 2023, http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.21978.72640 
• Steen-Hansen, A., Mikalsen, R.F. & Jensen, U.E (2018) Smouldering Combustion in Loose-Fill Wood Fibre Thermal Insulation: An Experimental Study. Fire Technol 54, 1585–1608. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-018-0757-4

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Is the "best practice" always the best approach to solving an engineering problem? Can we consider "best" and "appropriate" practices synonymous, and if not - how big is the gap between them? Join us as we welcome Professor Arnold Dix back to challenge conventional wisdom in engineering. Focusing on the nuanced distinction between "best practice" and "appropriate practice," we explore how context-sensitive solutions outperform complex and costly standards. Using real-world examples like tunnel ventilation systems, we illustrate the power of practicality, cost-effectiveness, and suitability in engineering, particularly in fire safety.

We also uncover the hidden economic motives that shape our engineering standards. From Stockholm’s innovative fire suppression mechanisms integrated into everyday systems to the critical role of regulatory bodies in enforcing effective safety measures, we highlight the benefits of familiar, reliable solutions over specialized ones. Personal anecdotes and international examples, including a farm story and regulations in Poland, bring these concepts to life, showing how everyday systems can enhance reliability and community awareness.

Finally, we explore how different nations approach tunnel construction and infrastructure preservation. Highlighting the challenges and successes of countries like Argentina, Chile, China, and Malaysia, we emphasise the importance of building local expertise and resilience. This episode invites you to reconsider how we define and implement standards across various fields by examining practical solutions in ventilation systems and the importance of context-sensitive engineering practices. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion on what constitutes best engineering practice and beyond.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

The last time I had Xinyan on the show was in 2021, and we were all excited about the possibilities that AI could bring to Fire Safety Engineering and Smart Firefighting. Three years have passed, and while we are still excited, we can now talk about experiences. What worked and what did not? Where were the challenges, and what was simple? You can only learn that from brainstorming, you learn this by doing. Xinyan's team implemented dozens of algorithms for various projects, and it is this experience we try to explore today.
 
The episode is bitter-sweet. Even though considerable progress was made in the AI layer, it is still not possible to implement this in firefighting. The barriers that always separated fire science from firefighting are still in place, and it is even harder to cross them with such a novel approach. As always, communication is the key. However, in the midst of the research, a realization was made. AI does not work that great with humans, but works perfectly well with robots. This gives a beginning to a new chapter - AI-powered robotic firefighting, and hell, this is really exciting stuff.

Besides smart firefighting, we spend good time discussing use of AI in Fire Safety Engineering itself. Xinyan's team is developing practical tools to assist the designers and engineers, and they look promising. What is most interesteing is that the implementation of those tools reasembles  how CFD was implemented back in the day - I have huge hopes for this technology.

If you want to read more about AI in PBD FSE, this is the paper you look for: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352710221003867#appsec1

If you want to learn more about the work of the PolyU X Fire Lab, learn more on their up-to-date webpage:  https://www.firelabxy.com/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Soot is perhaps the most complex product of combustion, and at the same time one of the most profound for our everyday fire safety engineering. The topic of soot is not getting much love in the world of fire science, so I’ve chosen to give you a broad introduction to this subject. In this episode of fire fundamentals we will go through:

·         Soot creation from chemical perspective;

·         Soot creation from practical perspective;

·         Soot effects on radiation, toxicity and obscuration;

·         Extinction coefficient and specific extinction coefficient;

·         Soot yield and surrogate value of soot yield for complex fuels.

If you would like to follow up on this episode with some reading, I highly recommend:

·         Bart Merci and Tarek Beji book „Fluid Mechanics Aspects of Fire and Smoke Dynamics in Enclosures”

·         Jose Torero lecture “Prof. Jose Torero - Fire: A Story of Fascination, Familiarity and Fear” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIY0litILRA&t=2082s

·         W. Węgrzyński and G. Vigne, Experimental and numerical evaluation of the influence of the soot yield on the visibility in smoke in CFD analysis – the paper with the source of our surrogate value of soot yield for complex fuels in fire safety engineering https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0379711217301327?via%3Dihub

·         G. Mulholland, C. Croarkin Specific extinction coefficient of flame generated smoke https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/1099-1018%28200009/10%2924%3A5%3C227%3A%3AAID-FAM742%3E3.0.CO%3B2-9

·         W. Węgrzyński, P. Antosiewicz, J. Fangrat, Multi-Wavelength Densitometer for Experimental Research on the Optical Characteristics of Smoke Layers, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-021-01139-5

·         K. Börger, A. Belt, T. Schultze, L. Arnold, Remote Sensing of the Light-Obscuring Smoke Properties in Real-Scale Fires Using a Photometric Measurement Method, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-023-01470-z

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode of Experiments that Changed Fire Science we cover T. Jin’s experiments on the visibility in smoke – two experiments carried out in 1970 and 1971 in Japan that truly changed the way how we model fires and how we design fire safety in our buildings.

This episodes presents my recollection of Jin’s experiments, based on the published work – the seminal paper at the IAFSS in 1997 (https://publications.iafss.org/publications/fss/5/3/view/fss_5-3.pdf) and the original material published in Japanese in 1970 and 1971:

• Jin, T. (1970). Visibility through Fire Smoke (I). Bulletin of the Fire Prevention Society of Japan, 19(2).
• Jin, T. (1971). Visibility through Fire Smoke (II). Bulletin of the Fire Prevention Society of Japan, 21(1).

In the episode, I highlight the technical details of the experiments and their potential impact on the findings. I also present the overall model proposed by Jin, indicating the variables that influence it, and my recollection of how this model was implemented in modern fire safety engineering.

Further readings to this would be some of my papers:

• Węgrzyński, W., & Vigne, G. (2017). Experimental and numerical evaluation of the influence of the soot yield on the visibility in smoke in CFD analysis. Fire Safety Journal, 91(SI), 389–398. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2017.03.053
• Węgrzyński, W., Antosiewicz, P., & Fangrat, J. (2021). Multi-Wavelength Densitometer for Experimental Research on the Optical Characteristics of Smoke Layers. Fire Technology, 57(5), 2683–2706. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-021-01139-5

And a very recent paper by my collaborators from Wuppertal:

• Gnendiger, C., Schultze, T., Börger, K., Belt, A., & Arnold, L. (2024). Extinction coefficients from aerosol measurements. Fire Safety Journal, 146, 104110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2024.104110

Please also visit episode https://www.firescienceshow.com/030-visibility-prediction-framework-with-lukas-arnold/ with my friend Lukas Arnold, on how we intend to change the visibility prediction in fire safety engineering!

This research was funded in part by National Science Centre, Poland in the grant OPUS 2020/39/I/ST8/03159.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Is evacuation of a community during a wildfire largely different from evacuation of a building? How much of the knowledge from the building fires is directly useful in planning and managing such an event, and what stuff is completely different? These are the lead questions for my today's interview with prof. Enrico Ronchi from Lund University and dr Max Kinateder from  National Research Council Canada. 

Both guests currently research the evacuation layer of the WUI problem – starting with the response of the endangered people, through choice of the mode of the transport, to solving the transportation models of such evacuations. A multilayered, multifaceted and interdisciplinary challenge, but one we need to have a good understanding of if we want to deliver good risk based, knowledge informed guidance for communities at risk.

In this episode, we got through their research pinpointing the difference between the building and a community evacuation. We touch the methods of research that are currently in used, and what kind of models they can inform. Finally, we get to talk about their recent experimental study during a fire drill in Roxborough Park, Colorado. This has literally happened a few days ago, and we can already discuss the challenges, and the first ‘anecdotal’ findings of the study.

Becoming open to the WUI problem and learning the challenges that are in front of us in this regard is critical to fire safety engineering, especially at the time when we observe Wildfire Safety Engineering becoming more of a real thing! I foresee that in future, a lot of us will work in the wildfire  prevention / mitigation/contingency space, and I hope you will appreciate the fact you’ve learned it first from the Fire Science Show! 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In the episode 10 of fire fundamentals together with David Morrisset, a nearly graduated PhD student from the University of Edinburgh, we explore the intricate dynamics of flame spread and its crucial role in fire safety engineering. David helps us differentiate between the two primary modes of flame spread, concurrent (imagine upward spread) and opposed (imagine downward spread), and explains how understanding these mechanisms can significantly enhance building safety and fire risk mitigation.

In this episode, we take a closer look at various materials like PMMA and timber and their unique fire behaviors. We also examine the complexities of flame spread on charring solids such as timber, discussing how pyrolysis and the resulting char layer influence heat transfer and flame behavior.

Lastly, we dissect the heat transfer mechanisms in various materials, from foams to solid slabs, and how factors like orientation and material properties affect flame spread rates. David highlights the balance between gas phase and solid phase heat transfer and the importance of precise modeling to predict flame behaviors accurately. 

Phemonena discussed here:

• flame spread definition
• concurrent vs opposed flame spread
• regimes of flame spread
• driving mechanisms of flame spread

Further reading: 

• Quantifying the controlling mechanisms of opposed flow flame spread: Influence of orientation, material, and external heating 
• Characterization of Flame Spread Over PMMA Using a Temperature Reconstruction Method
• The relative position of pyrolysis onset and flame front location for downward flame spread

And even though we did not have time to discuss diagnostics in the episode, you can check this crazy paper of David:

• Assessment and application of phosphor thermometry for spatially resolved surface temperature measurements during downward flame spread

Cover image: edited from Figure 1 in https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2023.104048

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

With two Directors at NFPA - Michele Steinberg and Birgitte Messerschmidt, I'm trying to find an answer to a burning question - "what really is the WUI problem?" The WUI is not just a line on a map with an X distance from the forest... In this episode we try to define what it is, and who is in danger. Instead of our usual conversations looking into characteristics of burning forests, or seeking the impact of detailing in construction, in this episode we try to take a birds eye view and identify the problem across the scales and frameworks. From seeking out good definitions and their impact on policymaking, through technical solutions up to creating new testing and certification systems. 

So where are the answers? Actions across the scales at homeowner - community - regional levels, in which they are interconnected and optimal. A fireproof house in the middle of wrongfully managed area will not be of great difference… As well as a dangerous premise at the edge of the forest… The outcome of a WUI fire incoming will be an outcome of propper actions taken at every level.

We need new solutions. Scallable ones. We need better testing and standardization, new listings. We need to find ways to involve the private sector and create interesting pathways for fire safety engineers to work with people at risk, at whatever scale. The future looks promising, let's make sure we are a part of it. 

Some recommended resources I received from my eminent Guests:

• Impact of smoke in WUI fires: https://www.nfpa.org/en/news-blogs-and-articles/nfpa-journal/2024/02/13/research-column-spring-24
• Defining the WUI: https://www.nfpa.org/news-blogs-and-articles/nfpa-journal/2024/04/30/defining-the-wui
• Preparing homes for wildfire (home ignition zone): https://www.nfpa.org/en/education-and-research/wildfire/preparing-homes-for-wildfire
• The Firewise USA Recognition program: https://www.nfpa.org/en/education-and-research/wildfire/firewise-usa/become-a-firewise-usa-site
• Outthink Wildfire policy initiative: https://www.nfpa.org/en/Education-and-Research/Policy-and-Action/Outthink-Wildfire

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

• pressure inlets/outlets [open];
• velocity boundary conditions [vents];
• mass flow inlets;
• fans and HVAC models.

• heat transfer at walls;
• shear at walls.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

A critical velocity episode... who would have thought? Even though I'm not an enthusiast of this approach, I have to admire the new science and researchers striving to improve it.

This week I welcome Conrad Stacey and Michael Beyer from Stacey Agnew to talk about their recent developments. We'll take you through the historical development of this concept since its inception in 1958, examining key variables like tunnel height and heat release rate along the way. We go into the Memorial Tunnel experimental project, and we discuss the context and the economic implications of recent updates to the NFPA 502 standards, exploring how changes in required ventilation speeds have impacted tunnel design costs and stirred controversy.

Conrad and Michael provide fresh insights into the complexities of tunnel smoke control, the distinction between critical and confinement velocities, and the significance of fire intensity in tunnel environments. Focusing on the historical Memorial Tunnel study, they explain the experiments that have been the source of our current models and how revisiting this data with modern CFD techniques allowed them to analyze this even further. With their newly proposed model for assessing critical velocity, the HRR of the fire is not considered as an important variable anymore, and replaced with the fire intensity (HRR Per-Unit-Area). This follows an observation that it is just the front of the fire that interacts with the incoming air, and thus making fire larger by making it 'longer' does not influence the outcomes - a new feature consistent with their newly defined model and Memorial Tunnel data.

You can read their study here: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-4278205/latest

Some previous takes on the critical velocity by the team:

•  CRITICAL OF CRITICAL VELOCITY – AN INDUSTRY PRACTITIONER’S PERSPECTIVE 
• Critical velocity and the significance of the imminent retraction of 2020 NFPA 502’s Annex D critical velocity equations Part One
• Critical velocity and tunnel smoke control Part 2 - Filling the NFPA 502 void

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

What if you could predict the last possible time to evacuate your community before a wildfire wreaks havoc? What if you had that knowledge years before the wildfires happened and built up your preparedness based on this knowledge? What if you knew how this boundary changes with wind, dry weather and direction?  I think you get a knowledge-based decision model, and that is exactly what my guests today have been looking for.

Join us as we explore this cutting-edge approach with Imperial Hazelab Dr. Harry Mitchell and Nick Kalogeropoulos, who reveal the trigger boundary methodology developed within the WUI-NITY project. Their innovative work determines optimal evacuation timings by calculating an imaginary line where the time needed to evacuate aligns perfectly with the available time, thus ensuring safer exits. This episode promises to equip you with new insights into fire safety engineering that go beyond wildfires.

We take a sobering look at the dire consequences of delayed evacuations, spotlighting real-life tragedies like the 2018 Mati fire in Greece. Our discussion underscores the crucial importance of recognising imminent danger, addressing architectural hindrances, and improving inadequate road networks. 

In the episode, we discuss the first iteration - the Population Evacuation Trigger Algorithm (PERIL), a tool designed to establish robust trigger boundaries for more effective and timely evacuations. This was later developed into a probabilistic tool, with a significantly higher capabilities.

In the episode, we discuss the complexities of wildfire evacuation modelling, discussing how transitioning from single scenario studies to probabilistic models offers a more nuanced understanding of various parameters such as wind and fuel moisture. Operational fire models like Farsight are pivotal in predicting fire spread and smoke, balancing detailed physical models with actionable results. We wrap up by emphasising the necessity of integrating community resilience, fuel conditioning, and improved planning to mitigate wildfire tragedies, highlighting the collaborative efforts that make these advancements possible.

Further reading for this episode includes:

• Integrating wildfire spread and evacuation times to design safe triggers: Application to two rural communities using PERIL model
• Design of stochastic trigger boundaries for rural communities evacuating from a wildfire
• The simulation of wildland-urban interface fire evacuation: The WUI-NITY platform
• WUI-NITY Reports

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Misconceptions in fire science are a strange thing. You present countless proof, publish research papers, and carry conversations, and yet… they live their own lives—spreading with no control and cluttering communication. One space is full of them—the fire safety of photovoltaic installations on flat roofs. In the Fire Science Show, we already had two very powerful episodes on PV—one with Jens Kristensen and one more recently with Reidar Stølen.

 In today's episode, we highlight a new guideline document published by the team at FRISSBE led by Prof. Grunde Jomaas. I invited Grunde to walk me through their document, and I took this opportunity to learn the origins, sources and inspirations for all the aspects they covered. The guideline takes you through ignition, fire spread, building roof construction and firefighting, giving a unique holistic overhaul of the topic. Most importantly, it is short, concise, and written in the most approachable way. This is a really good example of how communication in fire science should look. 

You can access the guideline directly here: https://www.frissbe.eu/upload/files/FRISSBE-ZAG%20BAPV%20Fire%20Safety%20Guideline%20May%202024%20v3.pdf

To complement this piece, you may also read this article on the background: Rus, N., Jomaas, G. (2024) PV guidelines – are the recommendations sufficiently evidence-based?

 As my personal recommendation, Grunde is a top communicator on LinkedIn, and you should follow him. He also runs a weekly newsletter, Burning Matters. I highly recommend this resource! 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Happy birthday, Fire Science Show! 

On the 3rd Anniversary of the podcast launch, I'm thrilled to deliver an episode on one of the most fascinating aspects of fire science - the compartment fire. Instead of going through the usual curriculum of the phases of fire, transitioning into flashover and flashover itself, I instead focus on the methodology's practical aspects. Which parts of the building have the largest impact on the fire? What is the impact of the opening? How much fuel matters? What happens in a large compartment, and how does it differ from a small one? Those are the sorts of questions I've asked myself while preparing for this episode, and the answers are hopefully in the episode.

In the episode, I highlight the essential contributions of key figures like Quintiere, Drysdale,  Kawagoe, Haramathy and Torero, whose pioneering work has shaped our understanding of fire dynamics. Listen as we dissect the impact of openings on fire behaviour, the role of materials, and the challenges of modelling complex fire scenarios, offering practical insights for fire engineers.

Reflecting on historical milestones and recent advancements, we also examine the travelling fire framework and its application in the structural analysis of large buildings. This episode emphasizes the significance of parametric fire curves and the need for an integrated approach to fire physics in engineering. 

If you would like to dive deeper, read:

• D.Drysdale, Introduction to Fire Dynamics (book)
• B. Karlsson and J. Quintiere, Enclosure fire dynamics (book)
• J. Torero et al., (2014) Revisiting the Compartment Fire

And two classics:

• T.Z. Haramathy, A new look at Compartment Fires Part I and Part II (1972)
• K. Kawagoe, Fire Behaviour in Rooms, Report of the Building Research Institute No. 27 (1958) - this one I do not have the direct link, so I will take a bit of a search.

Thank you for being with the Fire Science Show for 3 years! As we celebrate our commitment to delivering high-quality content every Wednesday, I look ahead with excitement and gratitude, dedicated to continuing our shared journey of learning and discovery in the fascinating world of fire science. Thank you for being part of our community, and here's to many more enlightening episodes!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

I'm very sorry, but I could not finalize the episode to air this week in time, and in consequence, I have chosen to have a short technical break in the podcast. We will return next week with a (hopefully) really exciting episode on compartment fires! It will be kind of a birthday party, so I'm looking forward to that and trying to ensure the episode is worthy of the occasion.

In the meantime, as you perhaps have a spare hour of your time and no podcast to listen to... I would love to invite you to my other project - Uncovered Witness. It is also a podcast focused on fire science - if you like the Fire Science Show, you will also love that one. I'll just share that episode 3 of that series is my favourite, and in my own opinion, among the best content I've ever created :)

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

A few weeks ago in Copenhagen, stepping onto the stage to open the SFPE Fire Safety Conference and Expo on Performance-Based Design, I took a bit of a gamble. I was invited to give an opening keynote, but instead of talking about my fire science and engineering, I've chosen to confront an often-overlooked cornerstone of our profession: communication. If you follow the podcast, it is not something new to you. I brought up this case multiple times - Fire safety is not just about the technical mastery of fire dynamics and code compliance – we, as engineers, need to be as adept with our communications so that our solutions are put into practice.

 In this episode, I'm giving my best attempt to recreate my I share the insights from my keynote, focusing on articulating complex fire safety strategies across diverse competencies and the crucial need for innovation in our communication methods. The art of communication within fire safety engineering is akin to translating an intricate language for a varied audience. From investors to fellow engineers in MEP and HVAC, ensuring each stakeholder not only grasps but values the information is key to effective implementation. 

By popular request, I hope you enjoy this talk for all those who were not able to make it to the SFPE conference in Copenhagen. And those who were there, this perhaps serves as a good refresher of that event and perhaps a point to restart some of the most interesting discussions that happened there.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode, we dive into standardization efforts for fire safety. An entire universe of testing laboratories, committees, auditors, and certifiers work together to provide product end-user fire safety classification. So, in the end, the user does not have to worry about what the product will do, as its relevant characteristics are well known from the certificate and, to some extent, from the standards.

But that's a perfect world. In the real world, it is perhaps not that simple. Crafting a good standard takes time and effort. And numerous features make standard good. This is the discussion between me and Björn Sundström, teaching fire professionals in Luleå Technical University and who is with Brandforsk, and someone who spent most of his professional career in fire laboratories in Scandinavia.

As mentioned in the intro, I also highly recommend other Fire Science Show episodes on the subject. I think Bjorn's episode provides excellent background, so perhaps they are worth a revisit if you have already heard them.

• 070 - Fire resistance is whatever you want it to be with Piotr Turkowski
• 089 - Designing law by disasters (or not?) with Birgitte Messerschmidt
• 140 - Development and implementation of the SBI test with Rudolf van Mierlo

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

The fire is detected in the building. Please evacuate. Do not use the elevator.

I’ve heard this emergency message perhaps a thousand times. It is deeply engraved in my mind to the extent that the moment I hear the first beep of the fire alarm, I know this message will come up. I heard the chime sound, and I knew I should evacuate and not use the elevator.

But in all seriousness, why? Why shouldn’t I use the elevator, and what would happen if I did (in case the building would not prevent me from doing so…)? 

This is the reason I’ve invited Dr Axel Mossberg from Bengt Dahlgren Fire Research, who has done his PhD on the subject of behavioural aspects in elevator evacuation and was involved in the design of multiple buildings in which elevator evacuation strategy was employed. In this episode, we try to figure out where the stigma comes from. We compare the staircase and elevator evacuation in terms of their efficiencies and the occupant behaviour/choices related to the process. We also discuss the features of a safe elevator that can provide an equivalent level of safety to an area of refuge, and perhaps even to a staircase.

If you would like to learn more about the topic, I highly recommend:

•  Axel’s PhD thesis, which is available here: https://portal.research.lu.se/files/118613954/Axel_Mossberg_e_spik.pdf
• Axel's paper on Evaluating new evacuation systems related to human behaviour using a situational awareness approach – A study of the implementation of evacuation elevators in an underground facility, 
•  Axel's paper on Unannounced Evacuation Experiment in a High-Rise Hotel Building with Evacuation Elevators: A Study of Evacuation Behaviour Using Eye-Tracking
• As well as this paper by Erika Kuligowski from 2003 given to CTBUH, which remains very actual 20 years later: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267797629_Elevators_for_occupant_evacuation_and_fire_department_access 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Wind turbine fires - are they an issue, or are they not? In this episode, I am joined by Prof. Guillermo Rein of the Imperial College London, who raised this issue 10 years ago at the IAFSS conference, and I believe we still do not have a clear answer.

In this episode, we discuss the fire safety of wind turbines using the layers of protection framework - from suppression, detection, and prevention to firefighting. We have discussed the challenges with evacuation and the subsequent fires triggered by "firebrands" flying out of the burning wind turbine.

I try to show this discussion also as a great example case study for fire safety engineering. Having this sharp cost of the fire (loss of turbine, loss of income), pretty much binary outcomes of fires (if there is a fire the turbine is most likely lost) and a cost of safety features, we can truly put a number on how much monetary value the fire safety features of a wind turbine bring.

If you would like to learn more about wind turbine fires, I highly recommend the more recent article in SFPE Fire Protection Engineering magazine and the IAFSS paper on the topic (from 2013).

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

CROSS UK is Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures in UK. CROSS is a confidential reporting system which allows professionals working in the built environment to report on fire and structural safety issues. These are then published anonymously to share lessons learned, create positive change, and improve safety. Find out more about the safety information we provide below.

This initiative in the space of fire safety is lead by Neil Gibbins and Peter Wilkinson, who are my guests today. We go through the ideas behind the institution and the reasons why we need it. We discuss the confidentiality and all the layers of protection of the reports, and the bias of the issues brought up. This includes the strict “no blame policy”. We also go in deep into some more interesting, representative reports published by cross (out of 99 published on fire so far!).

Please join CROSS UK newsletter and check their repository here: https://www.cross-safety.org/uk

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode of the Fire Science Show we go in depth on the Building Integrated Photo-Voltaic systems (BIPV). It is a topic relevant to many fire engineers, and one on which it is very difficult to find a lot of information about. For this purpose I’ve invited Reidar Stølen from RISE and a PhD candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU.

Reidar has hands-on experience with fire testing BIPV façade, as he has performed such experiments with the Swedish test method for a commercial project. The results of the first experiments can be found in this research paper: Large- and small-scale fire test of a building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) façade system. We go in depth into description of the test sample, the rig and the outcomes of the experiment. Make sure to check the paper for the before and after pictures of the façade!

Another paper worth highlighting is the investigation into the Factors Affecting the Fire Safety Design of Photovoltaic Installations Under Performance-Based Regulations in Norway. Related to this we have an in depth discussion on the factors that play role in PV fires, especially connectors as one of the main sources of the fire. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode, we explore wildfire's impact on industrial fire safety with Professor Eulàlia Planas from Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya. Eulalia defines the term  Wildland Industrial Interface (WII), a realm where the forces of nature clash with safety and process engineering.

In the episode, we highlight that it is not just the exposure to the fire itself but also to the secondary effects - ember storms, firebrand accumulation, strong winds or power shutdowns that may cause significant damage. Also, even if the wildfires do not cause fires directly, they may damage auxiliary systems, creating unacceptable vulnerabilities in the plant. Finally, we discuss what is the challenge of shutting the plant down and evacuating it.

In the episode, we will present the differences to traditional risk assessments when confronted with wildfire behaviour and investigate scenarios in which even the most robust chemical plants can succumb to the fire.

Further reading includes:
- Fires at the wildland-industrial interface. Is there an emerging problem?
- Asset Integrity in the Case of Wildfires at Wildland-Industrial Interfaces
- Vulnerability of industrial storage tanks to wildfire: A case study
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Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Depression and anxiety are on the rise in both academia and engineering consultancies. Everyone is constantly stressed and pushed to their limits. The system is built this way... And imagine that on top of the inadequate mental health related to the stressful environment, you also struggle with a mental illness. A health condition you did not choose, you may or may not be aware of, and may or may not be treating... Now, add trying to build a family and advance the most challenging part of the academic ladder. All of these are elements of the story of today's guest - Professor Ann Jeffers of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Ann is a colleague from our fire community and an expert in structural fire engineering. Well-published Author and co-editor of Fire Safety Journal, with plenty of scientific achievements. She is also living with bipolar disorder. She was diagnosed with the illnesses around the time she was trying to advance to tenure and chose to battle alone without disclosing it to the community or her University, as it could have impacted her career... What a tough choice to make.

Today, Ann is in a different place. She is well, and received support from both community and her uni. She chose to share her story through the book "Can you hear the music?".  (Available here and on Amazon). Today she is a mental health advocate, reaching out to others who may be in a difficult position, as she were. When I saw her talk at the IAFSS conference, I knew that I have to share this with my audience.
 
In this episode, we share Ann's story and general aspects of high-stakes environment in academia. We discuss the ripple effect of traumatic events and emphasize the importance of compassionate academic evaluations that consider the full spectrum of an individual's experience. From the balancing act of managing a career and mental well-being, to the significance of prioritizing sleep and setting boundaries, this dialogue is a guidepost for those striving for success without sacrificing their health. Ann's transformation into a mental health advocate marks a pivotal moment in her journey and serves as a beacon for others navigating similar paths. Join us as we bring light to these critical conversations, trying to make mental health a part of fire scientists' and engineers' priorities. 

Watch Ann's videos telling her story in greater detail:

• Can you hear the music - book introduction
• Author event 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode, we discuss the stark realities of fire safety engineering in South Africa (and beyond) as we sit down with Professor Richard Walls from Stellenbosch University. Our journey through the recent history of devastating fires, from truck blasts to the fire that took down the SA Parliament building, lays bare the critical gaps in resources, awareness and education that have catastrophic consequences. 

Professor Walls's expertise guides us through the complexities of local building codes and the vital role of education in fostering fire safety competency in the country. We dissect the shortcomings of current regulations and the promising strides made with introducing a master's degree program in fire engineering. Together, we unravel the intricate web of performance-based design and the imperative for a raised consciousness about fire safety in the building industry – a clarion call for vigilance that echoes far beyond South African borders.

We also try to form a broader perspective, examining how catastrophic events shape the future of fire engineering and the transformative lessons they impart. We also cast an eye toward the advancements in solar energy technology and the associated challenges it brings. Through this episode, we aim to try to support a conversation on the indispensable role of fire safety engineering in protecting communities across the globe.

This episode follows the unique DEI session at the IAFSS Conference in 2023. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the organizing committee for putting up such a fantastic session!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Imagine if we had a tool that we could use to design a design fire. Instead of simply assuming fire growth characteristics by slapping the alpha-t2 function, use a tool that could tell us which items in a compartment burn and what the characteristics of that fire are. I would say this dream is shared among many fire safety engineers - I think we can all agree that we could use such a tool.

Today's guest, Dr Greg Baker, has shared this dream and built a tool like this within his PhD at the University of Canterbury. The skeleton was a zone model, and the tool developed has played with it well.  Actually, feel free to try it out in here.

In the episode, we talk about how Greg built up this tool and how it decides on the growth, plateau and decay of the fire. We also discuss how such a tool may be critical in a probabilistic approach to fire safety engineering and general performance-based design. Who knows, perhaps in the near future, such an approach will also help us run our CFDs. 

If you enjoyed this, you perhaps would like to read more:

• Benchmarking the Single Item Ignition Prediction Capability of B-RISK Using Furniture Calorimeter and Room-Size Experiments
• Ignition of secondary objects in a design fire simulation
• Developing probabilistic design fires for performance-based fire safety engineering

And a bonus:

• Ranking the Level of Openness in Blind Compartment Fire Modelling Studies

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In today's fire fundamentals episode, I have chosen a difficult job: explaining how CFD modelling works without the ability to put a single equation out there! It's much tougher than I thought! I hope I've done a decent job, though.

I am trying to fill out this niche of talking about CFD at an approachable level. I've noticed there is a ton of 'introductory' level resources about modeling. Still, they usually very quickly go into mathematical formulations instead of explaining in plain language what is the purpose of specific models or modelling approaches.

In this episode, you will learn about:
- what is Computational Fluid Dynamics modelling;
- what is the role of conservation laws of mass, energy and momentum;
- what is turbulence, and why it impact our calculation so much;
- what are the common families of turbulence models (RANS and LES), and how do they differ from each other;
- what are sensitivity studies, and how does one choose an appropriate mesh for their problem?

If I had one book to recommend, it would be this book by Bart Merci and Tarek Beji.

If I had one paper to recommend, it would be this paper by Kevin McGrattan (open access).

Fire Science Show is produced in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you for your ongoing support, that allows me to create content like this!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

If the word 'uncertainty' sounds extremely boring to you, this episode will prove you wrong. I have invited David Morrisset from the University of Edinburgh to discuss his research on the subject. Whereas in fact David is establishing standard deviations, means and other statistical means of quantifying uncertainty in core fire measurements, the really impactful and important part of his research is on explaining WHY those uncertainties are there. Through physical explanation of processes happening in fire we may grasp a really good understanding why two HRR-time curves of the same object burned in the same lab, in the same way may be so vastly different.

These findings are fundamental for practical fire engineering. The establishment of design fires and their relation to the experiments is discussed in depth. We also talk about how we could establish better design fires for future engineering practice.

Some excellent further reading:

• Repeat Fire Tests of Upholstered Furniture: Variability and Experimental Observations - the upholstered chair paper
• Statistical uncertainty in bench-scale flammability tests - the PMMA paper 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

This week, I am meeting up with Imperial Hazelab's Harry Mitchell, who is finalizing his PhD thesis on mass timber fires and, quite uniquely - including the smouldering phenomena in those fires.

As a part of Code Red experiments run by Arup, Imperial College London and Cerib (which you can learn more about from episode 111 with Panos Kotsovinos)  Harry has performed observations of formation, growth and decay of smouldering "hot spots" for up to 2 days after the fire. Based on that, conclusions were formed on the occurrence and persistence of the smouldering in large, open-plan mass timber compartments. This is precisely what we cover in this podcast episode - what is the smouldering fire of timber? Where can we expect it to happen? What are the potential consequences to the structure and people who need to enter it (firefighters and investigators?)

If you would like to learn more, please follow to these resources:

• Structural hazards of smouldering fires in timber buildings
• Flame spread characteristics in large compartments with an exposed timber ceiling
• Review of fire experiments in mass timber compartments: Current understanding, limitations, and research gaps
• Fire dynamics inside a large and open-plan compartment with exposed timber ceiling and columns: CodeRed #01
• Impact of ventilation on the fire dynamics of an open-plan compartment with exposed timber ceiling and columns: CodeRed #02
• The Effectiveness of a Water Mist System in an Open-plan Compartment with an Exposed Timber Ceiling: CodeRed #03

And other mass timber experiments covered in the Fire Science Show.

Fire Science Show is produced in partnership with OFR Consultants.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Tests in the world of reaction to fire are supposed to be representations of real fire scenarios, allowing us to grasp the characteristics of building products against them. While for the worst scenario (flashover fire) or the smallest ignition source (small flame), the definition is pretty straightforward. However, creating the intermediate method that the entire Europe would agree on was a bumpy ride. Our latest episode is a treasure trove of knowledge detailing the birth and maturation of the Single Burning Item (SBI,  EN 13823 ) test standard.  With the CEN SBI group  Convenor - Rudolf van Mierlo, we discuss the history and background of the standard, the background for some not-so-easy technical decisions and perhaps even tougher political ones. 

In a project of this magnitude, everything matters - how do you ensure the method is reproducible and repeatable? How do you convey the exact amount of information in the technical standard? Will one of the measures eventually be the one that defines the final classification, and what does the classification reflect?

Towards the end of the episode, we try to put those lessons from the creation and implementation of SBI into brainstorming a pathway for a new intermediate test we really need. An intermediate testing method for facades, as an effort for the Dutch government and a likely update to the existing ISO standard.

Link to the conference we have discussed: https://dgmr.nl/en/sign-up-for-dgmr-conference-fire-safety-in-an-sustainable-future/

Reading material:
- The Rise of Euroclass by Angus Law et al. - a more detailed description of the politics behind the standard
- The Single Burning Item (SBI) Test Method - A Decade of Development and Plans for the Near Future by Rudolf van Mierlo and Bart Sette
- KRESNIK: A top-down, statistical approach to understand the fire performance of building facades using standard test data by Matt Bonner et al. - a more detailed description of how the Polish method handles different facades

Also, if you enjoyed this episode, you will like this one too: https://www.firescienceshow.com/089-designing-law-by-disasters-or-not-with-birgitte-messerschmidt/

Cover image - Effectis press release on changes to the SBI standard in 2020 - also a valuable source to see how the standard is evolving.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

I've finished my first large research grant! I guess that makes me a 'real' scientist now. Came here today to share some most interesting aspects of this project with you. Not going to bore you all about the wind and fire interaction physics (hey, there is an entire episode 50 devoted to that!), but rather talk about challenges and stuff that perhaps will matter if you would like to engineer a case similar to one we have studied.

So in this podcast episode, we will go into:

• How our framework for wind and fire coupled modelling worked out in practice (read more about the framework here Wind and Fire Coupled Modelling part 1 - Literature Review and here Wind and Fire Coupled Modelling part 2 - Best Practice Guidelines )
• How we had to go miles to modify the ABL profile so our wind predictions at the location of the fire are spot on 
• A bit on design fire choice, but plenty more in here: 135 - Contemplating a design fire for car parks
• And most importantly, how we handled the mass amount of data generated in 336 CFD simulations within the project. Our unique approach to statistics, indexing and risk.

The promised webinars will be uploaded soon, and you will find the link here.

Badania przedstawione w odcinku podcastu przeprowadzono w projekcie realizowanym an podstawie umowy UMO-2020/37/B/ST8/03839 do projektu badawczego nr 2020/37/B/ST8/03839 pt. Skutki oddziaływania wiatru na pożary budynków w wieloparametrycznej ocenie ryzyka z wykorzystaniem metod numerycznych.

Grafika autorstwa P. Jamińska-Gadomska (ITB) oraz P. Prusiński (NCBJ) w ramach współracy pomiedzy ITB a NCBJ w projekcie EuroCC (No 951732)

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

It is interesting to see changes in our profession that happen directly in front of our lives. Climate change and in consequence the changes in the wildfire patterns are one such obvious shift. In Poland, we do not ever have a ‘wildfire’ season, and I was kind of surprised when I discovered this is a thing in the South or in other parts of the world. Unfortunately, we do not have it *yet*. Some years ago devastating wildfire season happened in Sweden. There has been an emergency in northern parts of Russia as well. The summers are more dry – I thought that this is the driver of challenge, however, as with almost everything in fire science, the answer is more complicated.

I have invited Nieves Fernandez-Anez from Western Norway University of Applied Sciences  to discuss what is the ‘north’ doing to get ready for the coming threat. Nieves told me we do not need to reinvent the wheel – a lot of solutions, methods, approaches and policies do already exist. However, the wheel has also not been tested on all roads… Some things that can work in Spain or Greece won’t ever be feasible in the Scandinavia. Cultural and societal differences must be understood and accounted for when transposing solutions. The same comes to our models – they need to account for local vegetation, and its growth patterns. A challenge in itself, as we need a rapid increase in the amount and quality of information we have at hand.

I was a bit naïve coming to the episode, and the issue seems significantly more complicated. This is obviously an issue that a single researcher won’t handle. But here, another reason why I have invited Nieves. She is one of researchers who really get a lot out of collaborations in the COST network. Previously in COST Action Fire Links and now in the COST action on extreme wildfires. These networks connect scientists from different backgrounds and different regions, to create a thriving environment for knowledge exchange and crafting new ideas that respond to the new problems.

If you would like to learn more about changes in wildfires in Europe, refer to this paper.

COST Action Fire Links

COST Action european Network on Extreme fiRe behaviOr (NERO) (just started and open!)

Cover image - picture of wildfires near Ljusdal in Sweden, 2018, NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin and Joshua Stevens, using MODIS data from LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response and the Level 1; after Wikipedia: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Po%C5%BCary_las%C3%B3w_w_Szwecji_(2018)

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

This episode of the Fire Science Show welcomes once again Adam Barowy from the Fire Safety Research Institute to shed light on the pressing issue of fire hazards in electric mobility devices.

In this episode, we give a follow-up to ep. 085 with Adam, which was published one year ago. One year in the world of e-mobility is a lot of time, so we have a lot of catching up to do!

We tackle the complexities of standardizing explosion protection for large-scale energy storage and the implications of toxic smoke on human health. We delve into real-world case studies that underscore the urgency of our quest for safer battery usage and regulation. We also discuss the aftermath of an electric scooter fire on the Toronto subway, unravelling the potential danger these incidents pose in congested spaces and the evolving role of safety standards and research in keeping our communities safe. As we also discuss the role of certifications like UL 2272 and the promise of new standards such as UL 1487, join us in this episode to equip yourself with the knowledge to navigate an electrified world responsibly.

I promised Adam to plug in the https://batteryfiresafety.org/ - a public campaign focused on spreading knowledge in the safe use of batteries. 

Photo credit - a still frame from FSRI excellent video at https://batteryfiresafety.org/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode of Fire Fundamentals, we dive into the life-saving choreography of fire detection and building automation systems that must work together in case of a fire. We discuss the roles and challenges related to:

• fire detection and signalling;
• control panels and fire scenarios;
• smoke control and compartmentalization;
• power and water supply and management.

We also discuss the sources of potential delays in device operation, and how some of those are consciously built into the system as a means for false alarm mitigation.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In episode 48, my guest Mike Spearpoint said that in mid '90s, he participated in experiments on vehicle fires, as at that time, there were doubts if the design fires of that time (developed in the '80s) were representative of modern cars. Fast forward 30 years ahead, and we seem to be in a very similar situation. We have limited knowledge on vehicle fires, most coming from very old studies that have used even older vehicles... And we have a fleet that consists of larger vehicles, gravitating to alternative fuels and batteries. We urgently need a new design fire, and in my opinion not just that - we need a new design fire paradigm for the car parks.

In this episode, I'm explaining the struggles we had choosing a design fire for our NCN OPUS grant on the multiparametric study of fire risk in wind conditions financed by the National Centre of Science in Poland. We have went through the literature, and looked through all of the available data, to figure out some data points we could implement in our studies.

In the episode, I will share those data points (and you may refer to a paper which I will link as soon as it is published), but also cover my ideas related to:

• how do we carry out experiments on vehicles, and how does the experimental setup change the outcome;
• what is the design fire, and why do we need one?
• what are the goals of our design and why design fire should start with the goals in mind.

The design fire is not a representation of a real fire. It is a test scenario that allows us to carry useful engineering judgement. This episode is all about this idea, and how I am making sure that my current assumptions reflect the changes in the modern car fleet. Enjoy!

Some additional resources:

• Mohd Tohir's PhD thesis that gives the best overview of data up to 2014
• Our paper from 2014 which explains some assumptions for the car park smoke control design and summarizes experiments (in Polish)

Badania przedstawione w odcinku podcastu przeprowadzono w projekcie realizowanym an podstawie umowy UMO-2020/37/B/ST8/03839 do projektu badawczego nr 2020/37/B/ST8/03839 pt. Skutki oddziaływania wiatru na pożary budynków w wieloparametrycznej ocenie ryzyka z wykorzystaniem metod numerycznych.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

It's time to learn about "the evacuation equation" from one of its creators. This week I interview prof. David Purser about the elements that go into the evacuation process that help us determine the fire safety of buildings. We go through the components of the Required Safe Evacuation Time (RSET) one by one:

• detection time
• alarm time
• pre-movement
• occupant movement and congestion.

We discuss how those were initially defined, what the assumptions behind establishing them as a part of the framework were, and what engineering scenarios they responded to. Prof. Purser explains the similarity behind the "human behaviour scenario" and the "design fire scenario" as both being inaccurate descriptions of the real world but valuable for design.

We also discuss cases in which those simple assumptions perhaps did not hold, such as the complex case of the Grenfell Tower evacuation. We confront the harrowing reality of communication breakdowns and delayed responses, dissecting how they can dramatically alter the outcome of an emergency. This highlights that the methodology is not "ultimate" and it is up to the engineer to understand the complexities of the process and the weak aspects of it.

The method described in this episode forms the core of PD 7974-6:2019 Application of fire safety engineering principles to the design of buildings - Human factors. Life safety strategies. Occupant evacuation, behaviour and condition (Sub-system 6). The method has been implemented in many local codes throughout the world and can today be considered a standard approach in the fire-safe design of buildings.

In the episode, prof Purser mentioned "new data" on pre-evacuation time. In his IAFSS lecture, he mentioned some sources, including this paper by Lovreglio et al. 

Cover image based on a figure presented in paper 10.3390/buildings13123038

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

As we close the curtains on 2023, take a walk with me through the unforgettable milestones that have shaped the Fire Science Show. This isn't just a recap; it's a treasure trove of insights and a roadmap to the innovations just over the horizon. We've come so far together, with download numbers soaring and our influence deepening within the fire science community. My gratitude overflows for the steady support from OFR Consultants in 2023, and the future looks very bright with this collaboration continuing into 2024.

I wish you a great 2024!

Oh. The three big things.
The two of them, you can access right now.

Reach the Book of Fire (newsletter signup)

Access the Fire Science Show community at Circle (and reach the Book of Fire there directly!)

And the third one, investigation fire science specials, you will be able to enjoy around Q2 2024!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Welcome aboard a journey through the challenges of managing electric vehicle fires at sea with Elena Funk of DBI and Magnus Arvidson from RISE. In this podcast episode, we discuss two large projects devoted to understanding how we can mitigate, suppress and manage EV fires - project Elbas at DBI and project Lash Fire at RISE. Even though the aim of those were ferries and ro-ro ships, the findings are very important and relevant for civil infrastructure like car parks or tunnels.

In the episode, we discuss following technologies:
- fire blankets
- punctuating and injection devices
- water curtains
- low pressure water mist
- drenched systems.

As you can see, we cover a large group of technical solutions used to mitigate and suppress fires. In the episode, you will learn about the challenges related to each of them. We also go into general observations done during the test, also related to the growth and reignition of the fires.

If you would like to learn more, you need to go to the project websites:
ELBAS project at DBI
Lashfire project at RISE

If you want to find Elena's webinar, you can do it here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ms-hansen_firesafety-evparkinggarages-webinar-activity-7134936860115525632-mETf

And also, Elena told me after the recording:
One important aspect of fire extinguishment I did not mention on the podcast yesterday is water toxicity after extinguishment.   

RISE, Jonna and colleagues have shown that when the water is applied directly on the battery you get increase in release of certain elements (e.g. PFAS).

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c08581

I think this is a very important observation, and I need to an entire episode on that.

Cover photo credit: DBI project ELBAS,  DBI-ELBAS-FIXFU21008 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

This is an important episode. Our guest for today, UK fire engineer Mary Button, who uses a wheelchair herself, shares some of her own stories and feelings describing the reality for many disabled individuals. Drawing from her own experiences, Mary shares invaluable insights into the cognitive complexities individuals with mobility issues face, physical barriers, and psychological burdens related to the fire evacuation process. But most importantly, I think we touch on the essence here of how the building features disable people and how a shift in your mindset can help you design a more human-friendly (in consequence, people with disability-friendly) environment.

As we venture deeper into this enlightening conversation, we uncover the role of accessible building design in fire safety. Learn how technical aspects such as ramps, door widths, and pressurization systems can make a difference in ensuring safe evacuation. We also question the reliance on evacuation lifts and trained personnel, emphasizing the need for more independent and equal access solutions. 

 By the end of this episode, you’ll have a broader understanding of the importance of inclusive fire safety planning and strategies and the need for greater awareness and empathy towards individuals with disabilities. 

Mary was also very kind to send me some materials. Here they are with her short comment:
The post below discusses why giving a number of potentially disabled people in the population is complicated but also provides a figure from the WHO. I've also linked to the UK government report, which links to statistics on disability prevalence by type in the UK population. Hopefully, these are useful starting points. I've also linked to Erik's Egress Enabler Tool and the accompanying paper.

• https://www.disabilitydebrief.org/debrief/how-many-disabled-people/
• https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-resources-survey-financial-year-2021-to-2022
• https://zenodo.org/records/7075501#.Y5x-9OzP0bm
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36372652/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this part 8 of Experiments that changed fire science series we revisit Cardington (previously covered in part 2 - https://www.firescienceshow.com/078-experiments-that-changed-fire-science-pt-2-bre-cardington-with-tom-lennon/), but this time from the perspective of modeling the structure. My guest prof. Asif Usmani of the HK PolyU takes us on how simplifying the model led them to some fundamental discoveries on the thermo-mechanical response of structures to fires.

We discuss material properties and perhaps their overestimated role in structural modelling. We go into membrane actions and the role of restraints in shaping the response of beams and slabs to thermal loads. And Asif explains to me what this means at a scale of a building frame. Some truly remarkable insights - things that today are perhaps obvious to any structural engineer, but at that time were an unknown fire behaviour. 

Here are some links to the papers related to today's episode:
Cardington
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379711201000376
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0143974X01000049
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379711204000116

WTC
https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/1562

OpenSees
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-021-01184-0
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Xu-Dai-4/publication/283796522_OpenSees-based_integrated_tool_for_modelling_structures_in_fire/links/5647a6b108ae451880ac4f18/OpenSees-based-integrated-tool-for-modelling-structures-in-fire.pdf

Picture credit: British Steel, after "Newman G, Robinson JT and Bailey CG, Fire safe design: A new approach to multi-storey steel-framed buildings, The Steel Construction Institute, Berkshire, 2006" 
Accessed through:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303531122_Shear_panel_component_in_the_vicinity_of_beam-column_connections_in_fire [accessed Dec 06 2023]. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Carmen Górska from OFR Consultants, the recent IAFSS Phillip Thomas Award recipient for the best paper at the previous IAFSS Symposium. In this interview, we touch on preconceived notions about fire dynamics in timber compartments, and Carmen explains how she has learned the intricate physics behind it. 

The research discussed covers dozens of medium-scale timber (CLT) compartments with different amounts of exposed timber.  The findings relate to the conditions inside (temperatures, heat fluxes), the spatial distribution of the temperature and oxygen within the compartment, charring rates, self-extinction conditions, and external venting fires. 

If you would like to learn more from Carmen, here is her TEDx talk on mass timber, where she explains WHY we need research like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKXnKRD2EU4&t=1s
And here is the award-winning paper: https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85084762058&origin=resultslist
And here is Carmens' PhD Thesis, which goes much deeper into the topic:  https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_ec263ab/s4408332_final_thesis.pdf

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In today's episode, we go into the practical consequences of having an underventilated fire - that is the possibility of backdraught or other similar smoke explosion phenomena. My guest Dr Ricky Carvel from the University of Edinburgh, touches on the chemistry of combustion, explaining why the underventilated fire is different than the oxygen-rich one, and how flammability limits are critical in understanding dynamic phenomena that may occur in a fuel-rich environment. We go into conditions in which backdraughts occur, and how establishing flow-path or reducing smoke layer temperatures may be a way to mitigate the risk. Finally, Ricky shares on some future plans on how to give firefighters a real tool to assess the risk of backdraught.

And of course, we had a ton of fun with the movie Backdraft, and to some extent the American spelling of the word.

Some additional resources:

• Polish firefighters and door implosion video (around the 8th minute mark)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztrmC8o2UhU
• The videos we created for firefighters can be found here: https://fire.eng.ed.ac.uk/techtalks
• Our short backdraught video from YouTube:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kRoKckpJmE
• The Slo-Mo Guys backdraft (sic) video:
  https://youtu.be/ZyCCWuO0mQo?si=NHKkG82clnPOTPbV
• Two of our papers on backdraught/backdraft (FT uses American spellings!):
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2017.04.003
  https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-019-00914-9
  
  
  

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Dear friends of the Fire Science Show, and listeners of the Smart Passive Income Podcast - today is some sort of a special broadcast. As I have just been featured in THE podcast https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/shows/spi/ I've chosen to create a lightweight episode on what Fire Safety Engineering is. I hope this is interesting to people who never heard about the term and a great reflection on what we do to all who practice the world's best job.

I'm unraveling this together with our esteemed guest, Dr. Ricky Carvel from the University of Edinburgh.  

Ever wondered about the role of fire safety engineers in technology? Or maybe you're curious about the future challenges posed by complex structures. This episode addresses these concerns and more, taking you on a journey through the multi-disciplinary nature of this vital field. We highlight the growing demand for fire safety engineers in areas like informal settlements and the wildland-urban interface and discuss the evolution of fire-related education. We also shed light on the success of the International Master of Science in Fire Safety Engineering program. 

If you look for more interesting episodes for a general audience, here you can find them: https://www.firescienceshow.com/category/interesting-for-general-audience/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Dear friends, I am building something new for you. Something that should be very useful, something that I wish I had when I started my journey as a fresh fire safety engineer. And I’ve reached a point where I’m comfortable sharing it is being built and that the first useful version will be available by the end of the month.

So what is this mysterious thing?

I’ve named it “The Book of Fire” (please let me keep the origin of the name story for another occasion 😊) and it will be an online collection of resources for fire safety engineers. It will be built as an online course, with different types of material spread over different “modules” and “lessons”. This approach allows me for flexible management of the content, and for you - it means easy access to any module at any time you want.

Oh, and did I mention the cost? Thanks to JVVA Fire and Risk cooperation, this resource will be freely available for anyone, as long as it is maintained.

In the podcast episode, you will hear the reasons behind building this resource, as well as some technical aspects of it. And most importantly, the dates. The open beta access is planned to open on November 27th, and the tentative launch date is December 20th. During the beta period, I hope to receive some critical feedback so that the final product is the best version of the course I can make. And hopefully, The Book of Fire will become a handy companion to many fellow fire engineers out there.

If you want to sign up for the beta launch, please use the form at https://thebookoffire.com

Fire Science Show podcast is produced in partnership with OFR Consultants.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

I'm known for my rant about critical velocity concept in tunnel ventilation systems, and I tried to really control myself and not go into podcast with it :) But in recent weeks, when I was enjoying sake at IAFSS in Tsukuba two important things happened. We have received the PASCAL award from the Polish Ventilation Association for the best ventilation design in Poland - our S2 Warsaw Ring tunnel project. The second was the invitation from the Conference of European Directors of Roads to talk about my view on challenges in tunnel ventilation. So it seems our design in this space gets some appreciation, and people want to listen to this...

Here we go. In order to train for my talk in front of Road Administrators of Europe, please let me outline some challenges related to smoke control in tunnels. What are we designing for? How does air travel in the tunnel and what makes it move? What components do we need to consider, and how to turn it into a risk-based approach? And finally, what do we need to advance into the future?

I hope the episode is nice not just for tunnel engineers, but everyone who has to deal with ventilation or design fires, as it has some very fundamental concepts in it. I also promised some links, so make sure to check:
- The car park and tunnel podcast episode collection, where you can find episodes I've been mentioning in the show
- A study on airflows induced by vehicle movement in road tunnels by the analysis of bulk data from tunnel sensors - a grand study with my friends Aleksander & Gosia Król, which gives an explanation for many forces acting on the flow in the tunnel. The good news is that a much more advanced paper is now submitted and pending review. Fingers crossed!!!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Today we go deep into how statistical data about fires is gathered, processed, and used around the world, and what are the ideas on how to improve this in the future. My guests represent the EU FireStat Project - Dr Mohamad El Houssami from Effectis and Dr Martina Manes from the University of Liverpool.

EU FireStat is a groundbreaking initiative that aims to fill data gaps and foster cross-European collaborations in the field of fire safety. The conversation takes a deep dive into the necessity for comparable fire statistics across Europe, illustrating the challenges that come with harmonizing terminology and data collection methods. We bring to light how these discrepancies between countries can influence the way we interpret vital definitions, like fires,  fire deaths, or injuries. We also discuss the role of the quality assurance process in shaping the data and dissect the eight variables identified as a tier one priority in the EU FireStat Project survey.

If you would like to read about the EU FireStat Project, all the reports (including the final report) are available here.

If you would like to read the peer-reviewed version of their findings, please go for the papers:

• Closing Data Gaps and Paving the Way for Pan-European Fire Safety Efforts: Part I—Overview of Current Practices for Fire Statistics
• Closing Data Gaps and Paving the Way for Pan-European Fire Safety Efforts: Part II—Terminology of Fire Statistical Variables

And while we wait for the pan-European fire statistics database, you may want to look into statistics gathered by the CTIF Center for World Fire Statistics.

Fire Science Show is produced in partnership with OFR Consultants.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In today's episode, I have invited dr Eleni Asimakopoulou from the University of Central Lancashire to discuss her extensive expertise on fire behaviour of facades. In the talk, we will go through Elenis' experiments on ventilated facades (and clear out what they are and why we use them). We do discuss the complexities of testing facade systems. We traverse through the global testing landscape, comparing diverse methods ranging from the German DIN4102 to its American NFPA counterpart. We discuss the role of air entrainment related to test geometries, the implications of whether there's an opening, and the potential effects of a fire barrier in proximity to the fire load. 

Our discussion takes a heated turn as we broach large-scale fire testing and modelling. We go into how tiny details can dramatically impact a facade system's performance and whether we will be able to reliably capture that with large-scale tests, small tests or modelling. We'll also discuss the future - machine learning, CFD, and finite element analysis which are revolutionizing fire testing. Lastly, we delve into the newest research and developments in facades, discussing the advent of tools for material properties analysis, and more. 

Here is the link to the paper discussed in the episode: https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85085977558

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Balancing the cost and the potential to change a system in the future is a difficult act. Discover a new perspective on this aspect of fire safety systems with our guest, Jaime Cadena Gomez. We discuss the significance of longevity and sturdiness in these systems, bringing examples of technologies that have not withstood the test of time such as PFAS firefighting foams, and technologies that will rapidly enter our buildings such as Li-Ion storage for energy backups. Jaime offers intriguing insights into how engineers can future-proof designs without adding excessive burden to the design process, considering device lifecycles and their implications for a sustainable future.

In the talk, we break down the responsibilities and trade-offs in designing equipment that stands the test of time. We delve into the importance of the potential need for upgrades and modifications and evaluate that from the eyes of a fire safety engineer responsible for a strategy and a fire protection engineer responsible for choosing equipment.

We also take a deep dive into the intersection of compliance and innovation in fire prevention systems. We'll uncover the importance of creating a pathway for innovation within the frameworks of compliance—a conversation that promises to be both enlightening and engaging. Finally, reflect with us on the role of the safety engineer, the education they require, and the immense importance of understanding the technology they work with and its maintenance. 

The inspiration to do this talk came from the "Mars Habitats" talk, which you can re-listen here: https://www.firescienceshow.com/qa5-brainstorming-fire-safe-mars-habitats-with-ruben-van-coile-jaime-cadena-gomez-and-szymek-matkowski/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

When I heard that two legends of firefighting training  Shan Raffel and CFBT Roy will be visiting my friend Szymon Kokot, I packed my stuff and went to meet them with a microphone and a ton of questions. What I received was a brilliant discussion on how firefighting instructors are trained - from the history of CFBT (Compartment Fire Behaviour Training) to modern approaches. Shan introduced his method for reading fire (BE SAHF - Building Environment Smoke Air-track Heat and Flame) and how it helps the decision-making process in the most stressful settings. Along the way, we discuss the critical soft character traits that make a fire instructor exceptional, and how the art of decision-making and critical thinking can be integrated into the complex realm of fire science.

As we wrap up, we emphasize the significant role of understanding fire behavior in handling emergency situations. We will also broach the topic of cold, gray smoke, a seemingly harmless phenomenon but one that poses a formidable danger. Learn why experienced instructors are key to imparting this knowledge and how Poland, under Szymon's leadership, has made significant strides in fire instruction.

Also, if you would like to read more, here is the most amazing collection of resources you can find online: https://eurofirefighter.com/downloads

Shan's book can be found at https://cfbt-int.com/manuals/ or at Amazon, or perhaps you may want to find the CFBT people in your country to make a worthy connection?! Through his website, you can also connect to organize instructor training in your country.

Cover picture credit: CFBT Intl https://cfbt-int.com/

Fire Science Show is sponsored by OFR Consultants, huge shoutout for their long-lasting support to our mission!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Have you ever wondered how the understanding of AI can revolutionize the field of civil engineering? Today I am discovering this together with our own AI trendsetter, MZ Nasser. His latest book "Machine Learning for Civil and Environmental Engineers: A Practical Approach to Data-Driven Analysis, Explainability, and Causality" is the focal point of our conversation, illuminating the significance of explainable AI and the concept of causality. 

Our discourse with MZ dives straight into the practical applications of AI, and how it already has been used with a high degree of success. We go deep into the case study of understanding concrete spalling, perhaps one of the most complicated phenomena in structural fire engineering. 

We also delve into the limitations of AI in engineering and fire safety, and how coding-free software and AI principles could potentially usher in a new era for civil engineers. We navigate the concept of causality and its application in diverse fields, from social sciences to fire statistics.

If you would like to learn more, MZ Naser runs his blog where you can find all of his work and a ton of bonus resources. Check it out here: https://www.mznaser.com/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

What happens when fire meets a green facade? Tune in as we journey through the unexpected world of green facades and their interaction with fire. For the first time, I am sharing the story of how we built up an interest in this subject, first by my PhD student Jakub's burning question and a client's unique request for an office space resembling a jungle. For this job we have put green facades to the test with full-scale experiments, including the Polish facade method and Single Burning Item tests, considering the unique environmental conditions that buildings and their facades are exposed to.

In the episode, I walk you through our research and reasoning, as well as the design considerations. We'll explore the potential risks involved with green facades. Neglected maintenance and environmental factors can significantly affect the safety of these structures. We discuss the results of our full-scale experiment and the dangers of a neglected green facade.

If you wish to learn more, please follow here:

• <here will be the link to the FSJ paper once its out>
• A brief summary of our findings on linkedin
• Plastics and cavities.
• Recommended read from Prof Ed Galea's team

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

If someone ever tells you they have modelled fire spread for a commercial project, with 20 cm grids and using generic materials from (old) FDS database, please do me a favour and redirect them to this episode. Because modelling fire is a seriously challenging thing. And by modelling, I really mean it.  Not to apply a surrogate source based on a statistical overview of how fires looked like in the past for fuels of this kind. Not to omit half of the phenomena because they are too hard and in cone they did not matter anyway... To really model the fire.

I have invited prof. Lukas Arnold from Bergishe University Wuppertal and Juelich Forszungszentrum to tap into how challenging modelling even simple materials may be. What are the feedback loops and phenomena one must account for, and how do different scales give us different parts of the answer we need?

If you would like to know more about Lukas efforts in modelling, please check two recent papers:
- Paper on cone calorimetry of different types of PMMA (the material we have discussed in the podcast episode)
- Paper on inverse modelling the pyrolysis kinetics - giving insight into how one obtains the material data you may need for modelling. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode dr. Francesco Restuccia from  Kings College London takes me on a journey through different types of batteries, and what fire challenges relate to them.
We discuss how the batteries burn, and how internal systems (Battery Management System) influence that behavior. From the size and type limitations to the potential perils of a cell thermal runaway, the fire spread in the whole batteries, and feedback loops that we need to understand to create safer systems. We'll also shed light on the contrasting battery lives of consumer electronics, laptops, and cars, as well as some challenges in the second life of batteries.

In the final leg of our journey, we will tackle the complex world of modeling batteries and their management systems, touching on the challenges of over-constraint equations and calculating heat release rates from off-gassing.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In the midst of horrible wildfire season around the globe, I have reached out to Prof. Albert Simeoni from Worcester Polytechnic Institute for some hands-on commentary on what is happening around, and why fires all over the globe are constantly on the front pages of mainstream media. I am not sure if I was ready for all the answers received (especially how media are biased to fires in certain parts of the world and pretty silent about others)... But they certainly are great food for thought in considering the current situation and where it may be heading.

In the episode, we have discussed what promotes disastrous wildfires, how one can estimate their damage, and how vanity metrics like the historical return period for fire may not be good enough for future preparedness. Changing climate, human expansion, popular "close to the wilderness" lifestyle, industrialization and abandonment of traditional agriculture - all are somewhat responsible for the "new normal". 

Among the disappointing summary of current events, we have also found a bright light with Fire Protection Engineers being the missing link in the wildfire-urban interface and protecting homes and communities from fire disasters. And for this reason, this episode is well worth a listen for any FPE - you are more important than you think!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

It is time for some engineering fundamentals in the show. This time in the fire fundamentals series we delve into the details of natural and powered smoke ventilators - what they are, how they work, how they are tested and what interesting mechanics impact their performance in fire.

I hope this episode is valuable for all engineers who would love to know how the devices they place in their design are tested and qualified for use in fire safety. It should also be a great way for fire scientists to broaden their horizons and learn about very intricate details of natural and powered vents, which you learn only through experience in the design.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may want to jump into:

• Episode 50 - Wind, fire and a surprise
• Episode 47 - Effective pressurization with Grzegorz Sypek

Some of the papers advertised in the episode:

• Aerodynamic study of a city and its impact on the smoke control system
• Influence of wind on the performance of natural vents
• Roof obstacles and the performance of natural vents
• Smart smoke control concept paper (a more approachable one :))
• Smart smoke control concept paper (a more technical one :))
• Smart smoke control implementation paper

Fire Science Show podcast is produced in partnership with OFR Consultants

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

in Episode 39 I had the pleasure to interview Bryan Klein from Thunderhead Engineering on some views and predictions for the near future of fire modelling. Even though it was only 1,5 year ago, some major things have already happened (release of Ventus - CONTAM GUI by Thunderhead) or snuck on us unseen as the large language model revolution.

In this episode we discuss mostly the things that have happened in recent months, and how they can change the potential for fire engineering. The list of talking points includes:

• the release of CONTAM GUI - Ventus and a brief summary of CONTAM origin,  capabilities and use in fire engineering
• new updates to FDS with external sources for parameters
• GPT revolution and how API's can revolutionize work of fire engineers - code compliance, design exploration, CFD management
• GPU revolution and a new era of GPU based solvers for fluid mechanics (and FDS development in this direction) 
• cloud computing update and making it a user-friendly experience

If anything on the list sounds interesting to you, I bet the whole episode will be fun for you!

This episode is a very nerdy catch-up between two fire engineers, but I also want you to be a part of this conversation. Let me know what you think are the things that will happen in next few years that will change the way how we engineer?   

If you want to check out the trial of Ventus and see for yourself if CONTAM is something useful for your fire engineering routine, you can find the trial here: https://www.thunderheadeng.com/ventus

Fire Science Show is sponsored by OFR Consultants.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Most fire engineers would be aware of how openings like doors and windows, the stack effect, and even wind can significantly alter fire outcomes. But there is a considerable difference between knowing that it does, and knowing how much that changes fire growth, size and the internal building environment. I've invited FSRIs dr Craig Weinschenk to discuss his years of full-scale research on fire flows.

In this episode, we discuss different conditions that occur once the flow is established at windows, doors or through HVAC systems. How it affects the fire's growth and spread, and what firefighters need to consider when taking decisions on venting a burning building. We underscore the importance of compartmentalization, discussing how a simple action like leaving a door open can drastically impact fire behaviour and smoke movement.

Although it is a side topic in the episode, perhaps a very interesting discussion is on the battery-initiated fires, discussing the various failure modes that can trigger an overpressure event or a jet flame. We also explore what batteries change in the fire environment when they are victims and participants of the fire (rather than the source). I know many will be interested in this, here is also a good read by Craig on the subject.

As with every episode with FSRI, there is A TON of resources to go through. Our recommendations:

• Public live stream of a fire experiment similar to the one I was invited to watch - this is the same series of experiments in the exact same building
• Search and rescue training course
• FSRI Materials Database
• Github - materials
• Github - public repositories

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

My knowledge about fire safety at sea was pretty limited, at best. I was planning this episode for a long time, and then the disastrous fire happened at a car carrier near the Netherlands coast. In light of these events, I've reached out to Bogdan Racięga of the Baltic Fire Laboratory, a Polish maritime fire safety expert to discuss this particular incident and to delve into the intricate aspects of fire safety regulations on marine vessels.

Bogdan explains and highlights the critical role of the International Maritime Organization in setting and enforcing fire safety standards, and the role of Class Societies in classifying and certifying these solutions for ships. 

Ever wondered about the unique challenges of protecting specific areas on ships? In the episode, we discuss protection strategies for machinery, cargo spaces, cabin balconies and galley areas. We unpack those challenges and discuss the differences between separation and extinguishing systems, including the necessity for perfect cooperation between passive and active solutions.  Discussing some tragic fires we consider what are the consequences of a delayed response when activating firefighting systems. And how does fire testing play into all this? Bogdan shares his expertise on these subjects, delving into the potential misuse of fire suppression systems and the importance of collaboration between manufacturers. 

I've had a blast recording this and I hope you will also enjoy learning about the maritime fire safety!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Energy storage systems are vital systems in fuel transition and as a part of technology responding to the challenges of climate change. Not only for their capability to store energy but also for exploring strategies like peak shaving or allowing for more distributed energy generation. In this discussion, we consider them as fixed storage systems but also recognize that moveable load such as vehicles poses similar challenges.

Even though fire safety energy storage is still a part of academic discussion, at the same time it is a part of real-world projects, where fire safety strategy must be proposed with the scarce data and knowledge available. To discuss how this is delivered I have invited two Thornton Tomasetti engineers - Ali Ashrafi and Paweł Woelke.

We unpack the available sources of data, discuss the variability of energy storage device test results, and underscore the need for a risk-based approach. Discussing the approval process for new technologies, calling for adaptability and stakeholder engagement to define acceptable risk levels. An interesting topic is the balancing act between fire and explosion risks as well as the suppression strategies. 

Even though we do not know everything about the fire safety of energy storage systems yet, we need to act to the best of our capacity. I hope this discussion helps you in working out a fire-safe solution for your building.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this week's series covering experimental fire science, we venture into a recently finished Code Red project by ARUP, led by my today's guest Dr Panos Kotsovinos. The project was carried out in CERIB with the collaboration of the Imperial College London. History will tell if this experiment will change fire science, but I truly believe it is at least worth sharing!

The research was carried out on a large open-plan office (350m2) with a combustible CLT ceiling. It was a continuation of previous X-One and X-Two experiments on travelling fire behaviour carried out by Imperial College London in Poland (referred to here as the "Obora" experiments, listen to episode 27 of the show) but with an important difference - this time the ceiling was combustible. They were looking into how the introduction of the combustible ceiling will change the travelling fire behaviour, investigating variables such as the opening factor, the introduction of a low-pressure water mist system and partial encapsulation of the ceiling. The findings include observations related to fire spread, persistent smouldering fires, effects of the partial encapsulation and many many more which are discussed in detail in the show.

To learn more, please read the press release about the experiments here and most important - the papers:
- Fire dynamics inside a large and open-plan compartment with exposed timber ceiling and columns: CodeRed #01
- Impact of ventilation on the fire dynamics of an open-plan compartment with exposed timber ceiling and columns: CodeRed #02
- The Effectiveness of a Water Mist System in an Open-plan Compartment with an Exposed Timber Ceiling: CodeRed #03
- Impact of partial encapsulation on the fire dynamics of an open-plan compartment with exposed timber ceiling and columns: CodeRed #04
- Review of fire experiments in mass timber compartments: Current understanding, limitations, and research gaps
- Structural hazards of smouldering fires in timber buildings
- Flame spread characteristics in large compartments with an exposed timber ceiling

If you have any further questions to Panos please let me know, and I will gladly pass them on to him!

Fire Science Show is produced in partnership with OFR Consultants.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Ever wonder how scientists measure the intensity of a fire? Join us on this episode as we invite Dr. Matt Bundy from NIST. We discuss the intricacies of heat release rate, calorimetry, and how NIST is championing open data with their astonishing database.

You can learn more about the database here: https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/new-nist-fire-calorimetry-database-available-answer-your-burning-questions

And find the database here: https://www.nist.gov/el/fcd

I've tried to make this conversation for everyone. If you never saw a calorimeter or have no idea how to measure fire, from this episode you will learn probably all you need to know. If you know everything about calorimetry, there is a ton of golden nuggets on how NIST runs their experiments, that are absolutely worth listening too.

In the podcast episode, we start deciphering the art of measuring fire characteristics - from using heat flux gauges, oxygen and mass loss calorimetry and what are the challenges to each of them.  We then explore the NIST Fire Calorimetry Database, unveiling its evolution from a humble set of data to an open-access resource. Dr. Bundy shares invaluable insights into the development of this enriching database, which has metamorphosed into an extensive video collection system that records fire experiments. He also whets our curiosity about the potential expansion and collaborations lying on the horizon for this unique database.

Rounding off our discussion, we delve into the inner workings of the hosting process of the NIST Calorimetry Database, its data storage methods, and how it facilitates easy access to experiments. We also glimpse the future of fire studies as Dr. Bundy calls on the Fire Science Show community to suggest objects to burn for their calorimetry.

Cover image: frame extracted from this calorimetry supercut video credit to NIST and Matt Bundy

This podcast episode is sponsored by OFR Consultants.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode, we uncover the intricate process of fire investigations with renowned combustion scientist and fire investigator, Dr. Richard J. Roby from Combustion Science and Engineering. With over five decades of experience in the field, Dr Roby helps us navigate the critical role of the scientific method in fire investigations.

From the analysis of burn scars to the testimony of eyewitnesses, we explore the fascinating world of fire investigations, where data, evidence, and hypotheses come together to reveal the truth. We'll delve deep into the NFPA 921 standards, which keep fire investigations current with the latest scientific discoveries. We also delve into fire modelling, a tool that allows us to test different hypotheses and explain the spread of a fire. We also tackle the complexities of fire investigation and the crucial factors that can influence the process, such as expectancy and confirmation bias. Dr Roby provides invaluable insights from his vast experience, discussing the changing materials used in buildings and how they affect fire investigation processes. Finally, we explore the importance of recorded evidence and eyewitness testimony in fire investigations, and how to identify and understand biases to produce reliable results.

If you would like to learn more, I believe the best place to look would be NFPA 921, which you can find and access here: https://www.nfpa.org/codes-and-standards/all-codes-and-standards/list-of-codes-and-standards/detail?code=921

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

This time we try out something new! Instead of interviewing experts on subjects of their expertise, this time I took world-class risk specialists for a brainstorming session. And while sitting together, we discussed something out of this world - the fire safety of Mars habitats. 

This podcast episode is literally a recording of the conversation between the panellists, it is very unscripted and lightly edited. I really hope you will feel like a part of this conversation, and if you would like to voice your ideas - share them on socials or mail them directly to me. If you have ideas on future brainstorming sessions and who you would like to see at the table. please let me know!

In today's brainstorming session, the discussion is held between:

• Ruben van Coile - professor at Ghent University and renowned expert in risk and structural engineering. Listen to his previous and previous episodes on risk, and his new project to shift the paradigm of fire safety. 
• Jaime Cadena Gomez - risk specialist, an expert at Transurban with practical experience in tunnelling,  has a background in chemical engineering. Listen to Jaimes' episode on Maximum Allowable Damage method he was developing in his PhD.
• Szymek Matkowski - an architect whose passion is to design Mars habitats, involved with Nexus Aurora and known for his research on evacuation in low-G
• yours truly Wojciech Wegrzynski - in this case, space enthusiast and advocate for risk and performance-based approach to fire safety

Background of the discussion: Our exciting and exploratory discussion revolves around the concept of a Mars habitat, examining the unique challenges of maintaining resources on Mars and unpacking how these factors influence the longevity of the structures. Fire can become a catastrophic disaster, especially in a volatile environment like Mars. Our conversation dives into the expense of safety solutions, and the potentially devastating implications of a fire on Mars. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

If you ever wondered how to capture fires in photographs and videos so it is a real science, not just pretty pictures, this episode is for you. With dr Matt Hoehler we explore the world of visualization in fires - from just shooting the pictures, through composition and what is your target, to fancy techniques - water-cooling, blue light illumination and 360-degree shoots. We also discuss the role of audio in the further use of these pictures.

To watch for yourself how the magic works, check this NIST website:
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2018/07/nist-unblinded-me-science-new-application-blue-light-sees-through-fire

And to see how BOB was applied, check it here:
https://www.nist.gov/el/fire-research-division-73300/national-fire-research-laboratory-73306/360-degree-video-fire

If you would like to learn more, here are some resources:

• Developing 360 camera setups
• Imaging through flames with narrow-spectrum light
• Use of narrow-spectrum in the char study

And one of our own:

• Measuring fire HRR with cameras

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

And so we have reached the fourth and final episode featuring  Professor David Purser, a leading expert in fire toxicity. In this episode, we explore the complexities of nitrogen in fires, the impact of fire retardants on fire atmospheres, and the long-lasting hazards related to the consurgents and carcinogenic properties of smoke. 

We'll be discussing the different hazard zones associated with fire smoke and the potential risks they pose to people, buildings, and the environment. Discover how fire retardants can lead to higher yields of toxic products, and learn about the acute and chronic exposure risks of fire smoke in various scenarios. Professor Purser also shares his knowledge on the dangers of hazardous materials released in fires, such as organic nitrogen phosphorus materials, metals, mineral fibers, and radioactive polonium.

Lastly, we'll delve into the carcinogenic substances found in fire smoke and their classification by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). From hydrocarbons to ethylene oxide, we'll reveal the potential risks of these toxic compounds and their impact on our health. 

If you would like to first catch up on previous episodes (highly recommended!):

•  https://www.firescienceshow.com/096-smoke-toxicity-part-1-why-fires-used-to-be-less-toxic-in-1950s-with-david-purser/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/097-smoke-toxicity-part-2-asphyxiants-and-irritants-with-david-purser/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/105-how-much-smoke-is-made-in-fires-and-how-we-measure-that-with-david-purser/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this show, we have already ventured into the fascinating world of toxicity in fires, and I have promised you more. So today, I fulfil my word and invite you to another conversation with renowned fire toxicity expert Professor David Purser, who shares invaluable insights on measuring smoke and toxic products created in fires. From understanding mass loss concentration in a CFD analysis to exploring various test apparatus, discover how we can determine the yields and concentrations of toxic products in different fuels and conditions. Learn about the significance of the fuel/air mixture ratio (the equivalency ratio) and the need for defined combustion conditions to measure toxic product yields accurately. 

On a practical side, you will learn about prof. Purser's experience working on the Mont Blanc tunnel investigation, where he used CFD analysis to study toxic product concentrations and yields in real-life fire scenarios. Professor Purser emphasizes that while exact solutions may not always be available, science and research can provide valuable insights into the toxic effects of fires.

Another, final episode on smoke toxicity with David Purser coming out next week. If you want to catch up on the previous episodes, you can find them here:

• https://www.firescienceshow.com/096-smoke-toxicity-part-1-why-fires-used-to-be-less-toxic-in-1950s-with-david-purser/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/097-smoke-toxicity-part-2-asphyxiants-and-irritants-with-david-purser/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

What makes an experiment truly groundbreaking, and how can researchers plan and execute such experiments in fire science? Join us as we chat with Professor Arnaud Trouve from the University of Maryland, a co-chair of the MaCFP group at the IAFSS, to uncover the answers to these burning questions. Arnaud offers valuable insights into the creation of a structured, repeatable, and accessible database of knowledge, and how to design experiments that will revolutionize fire science.

We dive into the challenges of gathering data from manufacturers who don't share their information and the difficulties in modelling phenomena like underventilated fires, flame spread, radiation and soot. Arnaud also emphasizes the importance of well-controlled, well-instrumented experiments in fire research, and the need for computer power to solve fundamental problems in fire science. Moreover, we discuss the MaCFP Workshop and the three different solvers that make up a fire model, touching on the importance of IAFSS's endorsement of MaCFP and the resources available to access the discussions from past workshops.

The main MaCFP repository can be found here and the GitHub here.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Ever wondered how scale modelling can provide invaluable insights into fire science? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Professor James Quintiere, as we delve into the fascinating world of scale modelling and its applications in both fire science and fluid mechanics research. You will discover how this powerful experimental technique has been used to develop correlations, understand complex phenomena, and even predict outcomes of full-scale experiments.

Together with prof. Quintiere we go from plume research to exploring the potential of scale modelling in investigative fire science, touching on its role in understanding smoke movement, pressurization effects, and venting strategies in buildings. Learn how a deep understanding of the underlying physics can lead to successful scale modelling, and how this technique can complement modern computational tools like CFD.

For resources:

• Scaling realistic fire scenarios paper
• Scale modelling in fire reconstruction (a book) and a direct link
• WTC scale modelling

And for simply some fun - the mentioned Mercedes-Benz museum smoke control - designed with scale modelling!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

We all agree competencies are key to fire safety. We have discussed this. We have argued about this. We have come up with decent sets of core competencies, course curricula and numerous courses and modules that help us be competent in what we are doing. This podcast is to keep me and you competent in what we are doing.

But this is insufficient in the modern world. Because it is not just us who need to be competent. Today I've invited Dr Michael Woodrow from UCL to talk about what fire competencies mean for FSEs and for other stakeholders in the design process, with a very very strong emphasis on the architects. What is the difference between an architect that understands the fundamentals of fire safety, and one that wants to complete a box-ticking exercise?  What those fundamentals actually are for someone who is not (and is not expected to be) an FSE? And how the changing UK post-Grenfell environment makes this discussion today more relevant than ever.

You need to listen to this episode and share it with your architect friends. And once you are done with it, you are probably interested in all this Fire Safe Design MArch discussed in the show. Here it is!

And while we are searching for great resources, here is Michael's paper on competencies, enjoy.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

What is the Society of Fire Protection Engineers? I just got a really good answer from the Interim CEO Chris Jeleniwicz. It is our profession. It is us.

With this important definition sorted, we dig into what SFPE is doing (and more importantly - how it is doing). If you ever wondered what the SFPE Handbook writing process looks like and what will you find in the next edition, we may have some answers for you. If you wonder why SFPE is turning its guidelines into standards and how this future ecosystem will work - tune in. What is the role of the SFPE Foundation and how SFPE participates in building fire science? And by the way, you will also find out how society builds a holistic system of competencies, curricula, courses and educational resources.

I'm deeply connected with SFPE for many years, and it gave me a lot of joy to hear about the plans of CJ in how to guide this organization to success. And by the way, this success is OUR success, as SFPE is us.

If you would like to learn more about the history of SFPE, please check this website and the brilliant paper by David Lucht.

SFPE Events can be found here.

If you are interested in the activities of the SFPE Foundation, learn more here.

Fire Science Show is brought to you in partnership with OFR Consultants. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

This week we cover the fundamentals of smoke flow (proliferation!), entrainment and smoke plumes. All the basics that impact the spread of the smoke in our buildings. You will learn:

• the ideal gas assumption for a smoke mixture
• turbulent nature of fire-induced flows
• axisymmetric plume models and their origins
• spill plumes
• window and door plumes
• basics of smoke control

If you would like to read up more, please resort to:

• Review of plume models
• Enclosure Fire Dynamics - Karlsson, Quntiere, Johansson
• Fluid Mechanics Aspects of Fire and Smoke Dynamics in Enclosures - Merci and Beji
• Probably the best thing about visibility in smoke I ever did

This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants.
Thank you for sticking up to Fire Science Show for its 100th episode!!!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Do you have any idea how bad the tunnel fire will be if there is an EV involved?

That is a question I hear a lot, way more often than I would like. And usually, my answers do not get approval. I guess telling people "doesn't matter, passenger vehicles are not a concern" does not rank very well against all the media chaos related to challenges with these new energy carriers. Even today I've witnessed a random conversation of my father with a friend, where they discussed the future, EVs and how bad they may be in fires. It is hard to break through with some of the messages. Unfortunately, for those simple and reasonable claims, we need extraordinary proof.

Luckily, there are people who bring those proofs to us, so we finally can not only participate in meetings armed with data but also refer the peer-reviewed research and close the arguments. My today's hero is Prof. Peter Sturm from TU Graz, the leader in the BRAFA project on fires with new energy carriers (more about the project here). In their recent paper Fire tests with lithium-ion battery electric vehicles in road tunnels, they dive deep into fires of EVs in a road tunnel setting. We discuss why this setting is important to understand the consequences of the fire in the tunnel environment, and how their main conclusions were reached. You will also learn some about the new methods of extinguishing fires, as working alongside the firefighters was an important part of this project. Finally, in the podcast episode, we discuss how the results of this research may scale to larger vehicles, and what the consequences of low-probability high-consequence events such as an electrical bus fire may be.

If you would like to learn more about the crazy research facility Zentrum am Berg, you can do that here: https://www.zab.at/

Cover image by TU Graz, Lunghammer, reproduced from 10.1016/j.firesaf.2022.10369

Fire Science Show is produced in partnership with OFR Consultants.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

This week in place of a normal episode I would like to share an interview I gave to my friend Kevin Sofen in his podcast. In this episode I am interviewed by Kevin on the science of fire, how I understand the built environment and the challenges it brings. Kevin asks me some really tough questions, like what the fire-safe world is, and how to innovate in space of the fire engineering. I have highly enjoyed this discussion, and if you have not heard it at the Smart Firefighting Podcast, I hope you will enjoy it as well here!

This podcast episode is the original  content of the Smart Firefight Podcast, which was originally posted here: https://www.smartfirefighting.com/podcast/episode/351c46ad/episode-151-playing-with-fire-to-create-a-fire-safe-world-with-wojciech-wegrzynski

The episode is posted with the approval from Kevin, thank you so much for making this interview available for the Fire Science Show audience!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Innovation is a big world. A digital innovation sounds even bigger. But it is in fact our reality - we live in a world of constant change and "improvements". Many of those come to us in form of digital technologies, information processing or simply computer codes and tools. And I would say more often than not, these are not very helpful... If you share this point of view with me, you will rejoice in this podcast episode.

I have invited Michael Strömgren who is the Chief Innovation Officer at BRIAB to discuss his long experience with experimenting with the newest digital trends in the construction market. While investigating BIM, digital twins, IoT sensors and machine-interpreted codes we try to seek the reason why the construction industry is improving its efficiency only by 1-2% a year, and how those new tools and technologies could break the paradigm. Why we need to communicate more, and how the new tools allow for that. Finally, why systematic thinking is the way forward in the new 'normal' of modern civil engineering.

This podcast episode is produced with the support of OFR Consultants, the diamond sponsor of the Fire Science Show.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

This episode is the 2nd part of interview with Professor David Purser, this year recipient of IAFSS'14 Emmons Plenary Lecture. If you have not seen it, I would highly encourage you to first listen to the Part 1, which sets the context of the discussion here.

In Part 1 we have talked a lot about the toxic hazards and how the production of toxicants has evolved together with fire loads. We have also gone quite deep into the toxicity of CO. In part 2, we cover the combined effects of asphyxiant gases and some of the HCN toxicity. We also distinguish between asphyxiants and irritants, discussing in depth how each of those work on the human body, and what are the physiological and pathological consequences of exposure. We also go quite deep into how tests on animals were carried, in consequence - what we know about the effects of these toxicants on the human body (and what we just assume...). We finish the episode with quite an engineering take on building useful models and progressing the toxicology further.

These two episodes. Seriously, maybe it is just me, but I feel this is some sort of pinnacle of how informative an informal chat in a podcast may be. I have just learnt more about toxicology than in 13 years of my professional career and in my formal education (maybe it was just bad, dunno...). Please apologize me if I am over-hyping this, but I am absolutely thankful to David for spending some of his time with me and teaching me all of this. I hope this will be useful for generations of fire engineers!

If somehow, you want more. There is more. I highly recommend reading David's chapters in the SFPE Handbook, as they are the most condensed pill of knowledge and references on toxicity that you can find anywhere. Here are the links:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4939-2565-0_62

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4939-2565-0_63

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

I have to start with a word of warning, I am extremally hyped about this and upcoming episodes. I think for the first time I have recorded a podcast episode with a ratio of my commentary to the guest 1:5. This is because when you get Prof. David Purser to tell you about toxicology, there is not much to add. It is a story of the history of fire science, difficult discoveries and how a fire scientist had to combine knowledge from multiple fields into useful models. All of this is so that engineers like us won't break their heads trying to cope with the chemistry of fires, but can rely on sound models and simplification which make our professional judgement possible (I won't call it easy...).

Please join me in celebrating Prof Pursers' achievements, including his IAFSS'14 Emmons Plenary Lecture invitation - the biggest honour a fire scientist can achieve. In this episode, you will learn about the differences between material toxicity and toxicity of fires, and how that changed from the 1950s to modern times. You will learn how we have established some rules on the toxic effects of smoke and how the research on this was performed. You will also learn what the FED model is and how it came to life.

This is Part 1 of the interview. In Part 2 (next week) you will learn more about asphyxiant and irritant gasses, specific molecules that are created in fire smoke and how this knowledge translates to engineering projects. Can't wait for that one too...

If somehow, you want more. There is more. I highly recommend reading David's chapters in the SFPE Handbook, as they are the most condensed pill of knowledge and references on toxicity that you can find anywhere. Here are the links:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4939-2565-0_62

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4939-2565-0_63

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

It is the newest Internet craze. In my opinion, maybe even be the most disruptive tech since bitcoin or the Internet itself. And suddenly, we got a lot of very interesting conversations around, but I've lacked on oriented on the craft of Fire Protection Engineering.

I'm obviously talking about generative AI and "chatbots". If you don't know this term, you should definitely read OFRs paper on that in recent SFPE Europe! 

Discussions on chatbots are in abundance, but people having first-hand experience are scarce. I was lucky enough to find one, dr Michael Kinsey during his time in ARUP China was leading the development of tools, including a responsive "chat-bot" to read Chinese fire code. Here we talk about the opportunities and struggles they have encountered. It was not exactly "GPT" style chatbot, but one that follows a very similar logic and similar user experience. Plus, you have to admit - Mike did chatbots before they were cool!

Tune in to hear how this tech may disrupt our space and if there is a future for us in it (spoiler - there is).

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In the fifth episode of mini-series 'Experiments that changed fire science' we cover the compartment fire experimental campaigns carried at NBS (now NIST) in 1970's and 1980's, with the maybe most famous of them all - the Steckler's room experiment. My guest - prof. James Quintiere touches on the experimental design, design choices and most importantly - the technology available to measure and how they made it work.

If you would like to read more on this science, start up with these pieces

• Stecklers room experiment paper
• Corridor fires
• Wall fires and upward flame spread

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

It's finally here, the episode many of you were waiting for! Discussing the history of US fire movement with prof. James Quintiere from the University of Maryland.

I often wondered what it felt like in the 1970's and 80's when some of the greatest discoveries of fire science were made. I mean discoveries like the instabilities that lead to flashover, the role of radiant heat transfer in compartment fire dynamics or the definition of the flows through openings... things so fundamental to us today, that we maybe sometimes forget that someone had first to discover and describe them. This is what I've tried to learn from prof. Quintiere, had an enormous impact on the research carried in the US in that period, and was also one of the key people fostering international collaboration and exchange of experience. These are the elements of today's story. There is no point in explaining more of the episode contents, you should simply tune into what James has to say!

Keep your eyes open, next week we will run a second episode with prof. Quintiere, this time with more of the technicalities of the experiments carried at NBS in his time there! 

Episode artwork image credit - NIST Digital Archives, read the story of fire testing at NIST here https://www.nist.gov/feature-stories/trial-fire-look-nist-fire-testing-through-years

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

It seems we will not have EU Fire Code for at least a few more decades... Why is that? Because the people in power found out that it is not the most efficient thing to do it right now. And they found it through the power of research carried out by the European Commissions Joint Research Centre. I have invited Dr Adamantia Athanasopoulou from JCR to talk about their most recent report on the state of fire engineering (or performance-based fire engineering) in Europe, and it turned out to be a discussion also on how the law is created and spread in the EU and what can we do with the knowledge we've found.

If you would like to learn more about the findings of the JCR, they the report is available at their website: https://eurocodes.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/status-and-needs-implementation-fire-safety-engineering-approach-europe

(or you can just use this direct link)
 http://eurocodes.jrc.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2023-01/JRC131689_01.pdf

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Welcome to Fire Fundamentals pt. 2 with Rory Hadden. This episode is focused on the concept of ignition and its role in fire safety - as an event leading to fires, as something often investigated post-fire, but also as a vehicle to understand and measure general concepts of flammability of materials.

In this episode we cover:

• ignition of gases, liquids and solids
• flammability limits
• flashpoint and fire point
• open and closed cup methods for ignition of liquids
• a little bit of pyrolysis and heat transfer

Hope you enjoy this mini-series - more of those will be coming!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 happening in here', and I'm always carrying a mic you know :). So this was a very spontaneous interview, completely unplanned and unprepared - just the state of the heart at that particular point in time. I guess it makes it a bit genuine, maybe a bit overdrawn in some points, but still a snapshot of how I feel about the things being discussed.

I know many friends from outside of Poland are curious about first-hand reports, so here is my attempt on telling you my story. I'm not exceptionally courageous or generous - we've just sacrificed a bit of our comfort. There were and are people in Poland who do A LOT more. People who really sacrificed a lot, and I hope their stories get shared and collected too.

Thanks to all for supporting Ukraine. Thanks to all for supporting us. I hope the war ends soon...

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 section parameter in mind, limited water availability and precise expectations towards the system use and maintenance. Something that did not exist on the market. In normal cases, customers and lawmakers would not agree to not follow the book, and Ulf would have to adjust his expectations... But being the administration - the law and a customer - he had the privilege to just try and build up a system for his needs.

And boy, he did just that.

This is an odd story. A story of someone thinking purely in performance-based objectives, willing to accept the shortcomings of his technology as long as his primary goals are met. He is someone who has placed a lot of faith in fire science and believed that through careful testing and experimenting they can get the exact solution he is looking for. And someone, who truly succeeded with this, and his tech is now present not only in his tunnels but available worldwide.

You can read about the developed system here:
- https://tunnelingonline.com/new-system-developed-combat-tunnel-fires/
- Water sprays and spillage in tunnels - full report
- Large Scale Tunnel Fire Tests with Large Droplet Water-Based Fixed Fire Fighting System - research paper
- System presented to Polish professionals in 2019

Fire Science Show is sponsored by OFR Consultants.

OFR Consultants is a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. OFR is the UK’s leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for pre-eminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property, and the planet. 

 Established in the UK in 2016 as a start-up business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just six years with offices across the country in seven locations – from Edinburgh to Bath. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research, experience and diligence for effective tailored solutions.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, tests and methods in place, so how to create them in the best way? This is the theme of today's episode with Birgitte Messerschmidt. We venture through the creation and emergence of the Single Burning Item method (read more in this report) and reaction to fire Euro-classes. The challenges they were supposed to solve (and largely solved), as well as aspects that went out of the scope of this new ladder. It is an amazingly rich case study, filled with a bit of out-of-science issues like fighting for power, maintaining the status quo within some nations or maybe even simple lobbying (which you can read more about in this amazing paper).

What we hope to achieve with this talk is to make engineers reflect a bit more on the applicability of the test methods used every day to ran products. From understanding differences between material, assembly and product tests to questioning if a method is truly representative of the end use of the tested product, and is the threat is representative of the conditions the product will be exposed to. It is not about a revolution and tearing down existing codes and rules, but curiosity and a science-driven quest to ensure, that what we know is the fire characteristics of products installed in our buildings.

This is not the first Fire Science Show episode with doubts about the system. These talks are difficult, and I would also like to highlight:

• 029 Busses, flammability and an unknown force holding good solutions back... with Anja Hofmann-Böllinghaus
• 038 Fire resistance is not always enough for timber with Daniel Brandon
• 070 Fire resistance is whatever you want it to be with Piotr Turkowski

and for the very end, one recent episode with Ruben van Coile, where a decent pathway forward is presented. Btw. Ruben is currently recruiting for this project. Lemme know if you are interested and I can connect you!

Fire Science Show is sponsored by OFR Consultants.

OFR Consultants is a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. OFR is the UK’s leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for pre-eminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property, and the planet. 

 Established in the UK in 2016 as a start-up business

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 more attention to the episodes with Sara McAllister and Mike Gollner!

Anyway, today I'm treating my ignorance with the best cure I know - talking to an expert, who really knows his craft. This guest is Dr Eric Mueller from NIST, who has done his PhD at Edinburgh on modelling natural fuels, and now continues this research at NIST. Eric is responsible not only for researching this field, but also implementing and improving models and routines of FDS that relate to natural fuels. As such, he is a priceless knowledge resource. In this episode, you will learn a lot about convective heat transfer, porosities and drag coefficients - some concepts that were a little alien to me before... at least not at the level of importance that I would assign to them now. So if you feel you may learn this and that about burning living fuels, please join me in this episode. And if you feel it is useless... well yeah, thought the same and got reality checked pretty hard on this! 

If you somehow missed it, make sure to check the video from IAFSS20 where Eric received the best thesis award, and astonished everyone with his magnificent presentation. It is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHif1bh5o2g

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 is with The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center’s Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) - brought to the fire safety engineering community by David Lange (a previous guest on the show) and Asif Usmani in 2014, and now is championed by my today's guest Dr Negar Elhami Khorasani. Negar gives us a very in-depth view of the status of Structural Fire Safety Engineering and shows an inspiring framework in which probabilistic inputs at different stages of the analysis can be used to build up a model of safety in a building, that is much more informative than whatever we assume through design with prescriptive rules. A step up from the structural fire safety engineering framework, but one that feels very smart and natural. 

The best part of this episode is reading this framework between the lines. Yes, it is adopted for structural design. But it does not have to. It can be adapted to many different areas of fire science, and in my case, we will definitely seek an implementation in wind-fire coupled modelling. So, no matter if you are dealing with the most impressive structural designs crafted for fire, or if it is something not very relevant to your current tasks, please have an open mind and try to understand the workflow and ideas behind this framework, it seems really worth it!

And here are some resources I received from Negar, that may be relevant to you, if you find this topic interesting: 

•  2014 paper by Lange et al. on the application of performance-based earthquake engineering framework to structures in fire
• 2014 paper on a probabilistic model for fire load
• 2015 and 2020 papers on probabilistic material models
• 2016 paper on fire fragility curves
• 2020 paper on probabilistic models for permanent and live loads
• 2022 on the reliability of US prescriptive standard for steel column 

Fire Science Show is sponsored by OFR Consultants.

OFR Consultants is a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. OFR is the UK’s leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for pre-eminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working ac

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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. Today's episode is a statement of that. An experiment designed to investigate a single, most impactful variable. A chain of research, from small, through intermediate, to then full scale, designed with every detail in mind, to truly reveal the physics of a fire in a way we have never seen in a controlled experiment. Finally, a great finish with impactful papers, changing the standards worldwide and the tunnel fire engineering practice for decades to come.

This is what happened in the Runehammar tunnel in Norway. And I am joined today by prof. Haukur Ingason from RISE - the mastermind of this work, and dr Anders Lönnermark, also from RISE, then a PhD student tasked with assisting and processing the findings of the study. The experiments were carried out by SP (now RISE), SINTEF, TNO and industrial partners. In this episode, you will learn their path to these experiments and the environment in which this happened. You will learn how the previous experiences of my guests have been pivotal in understanding the outcomes of the test (truly, fire science is blessed with having just the right people, at the right time at the right place...). We will also try to understand the impact of this research, and dream a bit about 'how would we do this today'. And on top of that, you will learn a ton of technical details of the tests, sprinklered with a bit of tasty fire science.

If you want to learn more about these experiments, the single best piece you can find summarizing it is here.

One of the outcomes of the project is still ongoing - Haukur organized a seminar to disseminate the experimental findings, which eventually turned into the ISTSS conference series. This year, they invite you to the 10th edition of this event at Stavanger in Norway. It is a nice opportunity, as this conference happens just after Fires in Vehicles event, held at the exact same place. Learn more about the event here.

Fire Science Show is sponsored by OFR Consultants.

OFR Consultants is a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. OFR is the UK’s leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for pre-eminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property, and the planet. 

 Established in the UK in 2016 as a start-up business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just six years with offices across the country in seven locations – from Edinburgh to Bath. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research, experience and diligence for effective tailored solutions.

If you wish to learn about the PhD opportunity at the Fire Safety Engineering Group, please

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 cases all you need to place your compartment on a trajectory to flashover. A fire that grows that quickly means you have no chance to really react. And these devices are located in people's homes! 

To learn more about those threats, I've invited dr Adam Barowy of UL FSRI. Adam has thorough experience in testing and experimenting with these exact types of fires, and is a priceless source of knowledge on such incidents. I am not able to summarize all the amazing information shared by Adam - you really have to listen to the episode. It is absolutely worth it. But what is also worth your time, is to go through amazing UL FSRI resources:

• Online course - Fire Service Considerations with Lithium-Ion Battery ESS https://fsri.org/resource/fire-service-considerations-lithium-ion-battery-ess
• Examining the Fire Safety Hazards of Lithium-ion Battery Powered e-Mobility Devices in Homes
• The Impact of Batteries on Fire Dynamics

And the most important resource - Safety tips for devices with lithium-ion batteries

Fire Science Show is sponsored by OFR Consultants.

OFR Consultants is a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. OFR is the UK’s leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for pre-eminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property, and the planet. 

 Established in the UK in 2016 as a start-up business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just six years with offices across the country in seven locations – from Edinburgh to Bath. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research, experience and diligence for effective tailored solutions.

If you wish to learn about the PhD opportunity at the Fire Safety Engineering Group, please follow here. You can also check the LinkedIn post in which prof. Ed Galea explains the proposition here. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 show. 30:16
Direct answers to some of your comments. 37:08

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, who also happen to be amazing amateur philosophers. I throw them some difficult questions on why the industry is driven to do science. How is the industry doing science? Does it differ from the world of academia? What are the metrics the industry would measure the value of research? And they give me simply amazing answers, based on their very long practical experience.

This is a little different episode than the usual fire science, but it shows a lot of 'why' we do fire science. I think understanding how and why we do science is as important as the science itself, and some of the thoughts in the episode such as that the biggest impact is entering the building code with your research or the scrutiny and reputation related to research, are just profound. I think it is critical to understand how the world of science works if we are to trust the research that comes from that world. I'm aware this episode is not for every fire engineer, but I hope that those who find it interesting will find a lot of value within it. Just as I did.

This episode is also historical, as it is the first episode created in partnership with OFR Consultants, who are the diamond sponsor of the podcast for the year 2023. Please allow me to introduce OFR to you. And you can learn more and connect with them at their website. 

OFR Consultants is a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. OFR is the UK’s leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for pre-eminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property, and the planet. 

 Established in the UK in 2016 as a start-up business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just six years with offices across the country in seven locations – from Edinburgh to Bath. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research, experience and diligence for effective tailored solutions.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 combustion. We have covered the following topics:

• diffusion flame;
• flammability limits;
• role of heat transfer in solid and liquid phase fires;
• ignition sources and ignition energy;
• fire retardants;
• effects of scale in flammability;
• and the ways to measure the fire.

Quite a lot for a first lecture, and it is a little longer than the usual Fire Science Show episode, but I'm sure it is worth it. Let me know what you think about this mini-series and send me ideas for future episodes.

I also promised to link to three masterpieces you need to read as a fire engineer, these are:

• An Introduction to Fire Dynamics, Third Edition by Dougal Drysdale;
• Fundamentals of Fire Phenomena by James Quintiere;
• Enclosure fire dynamics (recently revised!) by Bjorn Karlsson and James Quintiere 

Learn more about the Fire Engineering Science MSc at the University of Edinburgh here.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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. Can jet fuel melt steel beams? Can fire take down a skyscraper? Why both have collapsed and why in this order? And on top of that, everyone suing everyone.

To appreciate the challenge, let's contemplate the tools of that time (FDS).
You have a giant building to model - what do you do? You cut it into smaller meshes and run on multi CPU's. Easy right? Nope. Not there yet.
Defining parameters of fuel? Pyrolysis model? Nope, not really.
Transferring data out to FEM software? Ha, you wish. Go and program that from scratch.
At least you have it easy with Adiabatic Surface Temperature right? (...)

Yup, it was a very young solver given a very mature task. But they did it. They programmed what was needed to program. They used the cleverest techniques to calibrate models. They have used fire experiments to approximate the fire growth... and in the end, they achieved something they can proudly call a reconstruction of the WTC fire. All in the shadow, not talking to anyone (remember everyone suing everyone part?). I think even today this would be a massive and challenging project. But for the early 2000's it is an engineering masterpiece.

Join me and Kevin McGrattan and listen to the full story.
A summary of the inquiry is available here.
Cover image credit: https://www.nist.gov/image/wtctowerfiretest2003jpg

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 our little scientific community can feel proud that a tool of this magnitude was built just for us!

But it did not build itself. There is a history of giants paving the route with their low-Mach number approximation of Navier-Stokes. There is my today's guest - Dr Kevin McGrattan who saw the need and built the first iteration of FDS (and still leads its development 20 years later). And there is a team of brilliant scientists at NIST, VTT and other parts of the world, who shared this dream of a robust, open-access fire simulator, and volunteered their hard work into making this dream a reality.

In this podcast episode, we focus on the very early days of FDS (or even before it came to life). My mission was to learn how FDS was built, what the landscape looked like back then and how it was growing. When particular important sub-models came into existence and what triggered that. We also learn what were the goals for the tool development and how did they evolve over the years as the project got more and more serious.  You may be surprised by some very simple explanations beyond some very tough design decisions!

I hope you enjoy this episode. Please appreciate dr Kevin McGrattan and the hard work done at NIST, VTT and other places, that enabled us to have something really special. Our solver. Fine tuned for fire and open to all.

Learn more about FDS at the project website at NIST or the GitHub repository.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 not guarantee success when you have to pass 9-12 independent reviewers and a multiple-stage recruitment process... But it seems to be worth it. A five-year funding scheme that allows a truly grand design to be pursued.

And this exactly is the case with the framework proposed by prof. van Coile. He is not the first one to recognize we need a new foundation stone for fire safety, but he surely is one of those who give the clearest and most achievable pathway on how to get there.  I highly recommend this episode to all fire safety engineers, not to just learn about the grant Ruben has just obtained, but to view the current state of FSE through the lens of this proposal. As it does, in an excellent way, highlight the shortcomings and failures of modern fire engineering.

Join us in this talk, and if you would like to read more about the grant, here is its official abstract (and near future will bring material for sure!).

Proposal Summary
Adaptive Fire Testing: A new foundation stone for fire safety (AFireTest)

The current fire safety paradigm is based on a set of standardized tests which have been developed as part of a prescriptive design framework, and do not provide in-depth understanding of construction products’ fire performance. The resulting incomplete fire performance characterization hampers the much needed innovation in the built environment. The current fire safety paradigm also places tremendous emphasis on the expertise of controlling bodies (AHJ), making them responsible both for the specification of detailed prescriptive rules, and for the acceptance of performance based designs. This is unsustainable in the face of innovation.

AFireTest strives to induce a paradigm shift in fire safety science and engineering (FSSE). The core of AFireTest is the development of Adaptive Fire Testing whereby optimum fire tests are determined from the infinite number of possible test specifications through the maximum expected net information gain (Value of Information, VoI). This will be developed using modern glazing and load bearing glass as innovative case study, resulting in breakthroughs in fire performance understanding. Secondly, a framework for advanced ‘grey’ surrogate modelling will be developed, combining the pattern identification strengths of machine learning with fundamental FSSE constraints. This will introduce a powerful new tool to FSSE and enable the VoI optimization. A grey modelling approach will also be developed for quasiinstantaneous building specific risk evaluations, allowing a new approach to the AHJ acceptance of fire designs. The future operationalization of the new framework for fire design acceptance will require large follow-up investments. Thus, stakeholder buy-in is crucial. Therefore, AFireTest will develop a methodology for the cost-benefit evaluation of fire safety frameworks. For the first time, fire safety approaches will be evaluated from the perspective of Law and Economics, laying the groundwork for an entirely n

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 the so-called "decay" phase of the fire.

What is new, though, are some recent observations related to the behaviour of timber elements in this phase of the fire. Today's guests Thomas Gernay and Jochen Zehfuss (along with a team that I call EU Fire All-Star Team) have performed a very precise study in which they have shown on one example the exact conditions in which the load-bearing capacity is lost in the decay phase by a column. If you missed that, they made quite an impression on LinkedIn (check the post and discussion here). In their experiments carried out within a well-controlled furnace environment, the variable they played with was the duration of the heating phase. It allowed them to find out two separate behaviours - one in which the column collapses in the decay phase, and one (not very different) in which the collapse does not happen.  To learn more, please join us in the episode, and for sure - read the research paper provided in here.

If you would like a quick insight, I will also steal some text from Thomas's post on LinkedIn, as he did a great job summarizing their research. So here is his short comment:

"Two of the columns were subjected to ISO 834 heating until failure. They failed after 55 and 58 min (-> standard fire resistance).

Two other columns were subjected to 15 min of ISO 834 heating followed by controlled cooling. Flames self-extinguished after 40 min. But the columns still failed during the cooling phase, respectively after 98 and 153 min.

The load on the timber columns was constant throughout the tests. What changes between 15 min (end of heating) and 153 min (failure)? Heat transfer. The temperature of the inner parts of the column section continues increasing. Hence the strength continues decreasing.

Flaming and charring are not necessary for this inner temperature increase. And the absence of flaming is not a good predictor that the column is safe (see video).

By better understanding these phenomena, we can design to account for them - and achieve safe and resilient timber designs, including for burnout resistance when needed. Numerical modelling can support this objective. But simple methods based on charring rate fall short because they don't account for the slow heat transfer processes during the cooling phase."

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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:

1. Fire resistance of joints asked by Millie Wan (answered by Piotr Turkowski) - jump to 1:41 
2. Fire detection in car parks asked by Elena Funk - jump to 11:10
3. Balancing safety and architectural beauty asked by Ekonudim Friday - jump to 15:51
4. Comment on driving fire safety in Iran by Neda Farhoudi - jump to 21:34
5. Smoke control strategies for boutique shops in malls asked by Szymek Matkowski - jump to 27:00

Please join my 2022 Listener Experience Survey - the link will work till Christmas 2022 :)

Episodes mentioned in this one:
073 - Smoke control in shopping malls - uncommon aspects that make or break the system
070 - Fire resistance is whatever you want it to be with Piotr Turkowski
015 - Global view on the fire safety from a starchitect perpective with Benjamin Ralph

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 focusing on single elements of the building (which we had been doing for ~150 years at that point) we did observe, touch and measure the behaviour of the entire structure. We did learn a lot from that... From understanding membrane actions, and the alternative load paths in structures, through validation of the natural fire Eurocode model to building a massive database still used to this day to verify and validate modern tools of structural fire engineering. Without Cardington, fire science would not be here. So please join me in this and listen to Tom's recollection of the glorious days of the fire science, at Cardington.

If you want to read more, I would start with the Book on the Behaviour of Multi Storey Steel Framed Buildings in Fire.
and also check these resources:

• BRE website about the tests
• Steelconstruction.info repository of test reports and data
• 2001 Cardington reports
• Steel frames under fire conditions  (PiT project final report)
• other UoE Cardington reports (PiT project)

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 fight fires... in fact, it is much much more. This is what we have discussed with prof. Richard Walls of Stallenbosch University in South Africa. Richard's group is leading in efforts to understand the science behind the informal settlement fires (and participated in the notable IRIS project by the University of Edinburgh, which is something you should also check here).

As discussed in the episode, Richard's group has prepared Fire Safety Engineering Guidelines, which can be accessed here for free! Please check it out and share it with those who may benefit from it.

If you have missed the episode with Danielle Antonellis, please check it in here.

Check out the free training series and documentaries on battling fires in informal settlements at Stallenbosch University Fire Group (FireSun) youtube (preview for the guests of Fire Science Show, soon to be released to the public!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi21ZyVLOWI

Picture credit: https://www.sun.ac.za/english/Lists/news/DispForm.aspx?ID=7730

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 fire engineering.

To learn more about the testing programme please visit the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering and the proceedings of the FIRESEAT Symposium 2007 which covered the study in depth. Guillermo's blog article about blind vs open fire modelling can be found here.

 The major papers discussed within this episode are:

• Round-robin study of a priori modelling predictions of the Dalmarnock Fire Test One
• Modelling of the Growth Phase of Dalmarnock Fire Test One
• Posteriori Modelling of Fire Test One

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, clothes...) become a major risk factor.

From my today's guest, Dr David L. Urban of NASA Glenn Research Centre, we will learn about the catastrophical fires that shaped the space industry. We get introduced to testing methods and fire safety engineering solutions commonly used on older and modern spaceships, and also try to take on the issue of fire safety of beyond-Earth human habitats.

I'm not sure how much practical engineering you will learn, but I am more than sure that you will enjoy this thoroughly. And maybe one day, you can pursue a career in space fire engineering...Who knows!

Additional resources:

• Saffire project
• 25 Years Ago: Fire Aboard Space Station Mir
• BBC 13 minutes to the moon - episode 4 (Apollo 1 fire)

Cover picture credit: NASA Glenn Research Centre
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/studying-flame-behavior-in-microgravity-with-a-solid-high-five

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 them, you soon realize how crazy the solid heat transfer can become when you change not only the thermal conductivity but also the size of your body. Boy, what a complexity in a sub-millimetre layer of paint!

To learn all about them, I have invited dr Andrea Lucherini of FRISSBE  and Ghent University, who mastered them in his MSc and PhD. Andrea covers in detail all the mag... I mean engineering that goes into an intumescent coating and shares his own journey in this world.

In this episode, we have referenced episode 70 with Piotr Turkowski - fire resistance. If you have not heard it, it's a good moment to catch up.

Andrea has provided me links to his research, which I highly recommend:
- PhD thesis: https://doi.org/10.14264/uql.2020.1021
- modelling: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijthermalsci.2022.107922
- influence of heating conditions and thickness: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2020.103078
- influence of substrate: https://doi.org/10.1002/fam.2840
- application on timber: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2019.102887
- critical literature review: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcsr.2019.105712
- onset of swelling: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2019.03.014
- MSc thesis paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2017.10.004

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 passion into quite an intense research that ended up with a PhD.

What matters in this journey is not the profits or titles I've received, but my own transformation. From someone seeking to optimize a system through improving assumptions for my analytical models and some more advanced calculation methods, to someone who appreciates the complexity of airflow in a labyrinthine mall. And some conclusions of this journey I would like to share with you. What I think are the uncommon things that make or break a smoke control system in a mall? Listen to the episode and you will find out (TL:DR - design fire, architecture, inlets, architecture and outlets :))

Here are some resources you may find useful:
- Gus Gaggliardi's list of resources mentioned in the podcast intro;
- My ResearchGate with a ton of resources on smoke control;
- The only English paper from my PhD with the summary of findings;
- I've lied, there is a second paper from my PhD summarizing why it does not matter where you place the fire in a compartment when running CFD!
- Review paper on axisymmetric plume models
- Actually, a funny story - in the end, I've written a book on smoke control in malls and it is available here (in Polish, sorry!). It is a summary of my PhD and not a guidebook as I've envisioned in 2016, but still - I guess it counts as a book :)

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 not mind that.

Of course, starting a second IMFSE is probably not feasible, but let us focus on WHY this particular programme is so successful. What makes this group of people so sought on the job market, and so competent when pursuing careers in academia? How is this programme so consistent, year after year, delivering world-class fire engineers? We try to isolate the little things that differentiate this programme from others in the world, so copying their success is a little easier. This episode is for anyone who is seeking an answer to the question, of what makes a great fire engineer.

If you are in a (lucky!) position to choose your MSc course, make sure to consider applying to IMFSE at www.imfse.be If I was making that decision today, I would not hesitate for a second!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 shortcomings and strengths.

I did not find this out on my own. It just had an amazing guest - prof. Ruben van Coile, outlined the risk concept for me, so I could discover it once again. And here, we both welcome you to join us in this discovery.

As you are done with this episode, I definitely recommend episode 45 where Ruben van Coile and Danny Hopkin discuss how risk can be used to determine the foundations of fire safety. If you liked this one, episode 45 is for you.

I will also shamelessly copy the list of resources provided the last time, as they are as relevant to this episode: 

1. D. Hopkin, R. Van Coile, and L. David, ‘Certain Uncertainty-Demonstrating safety in fire engineering design and the need for safety targets.’, SFPE Europe, 2017
2. R. Van Coile, D. Hopkin, D. Lange, G. Jomaas, and L. Bisby, ‘The Need for Hierarchies of Acceptance Criteria for Probabilistic Risk Assessments in Fire Engineering’, Fire Technol, vol. 55, no. 4, pp. 1111–1146, Jul. 2019
3. R. Van Coile, D. Hopkin, and D. Lange, Guest Editorial: Probabilistic Methods in Fire Safety Engineering. Springer US, 2019
4. R. Van Coile, N. Elhami Khorasani, D. Lange, and D. Hopkin, ‘Uncertainty in Structural Fire Design’, in International Handbook of Structural Fire Engineering, K. LaMalva and D. Hopkin, Eds. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021, pp. 323–411
5. D. Hopkin, I. Fu, and R. Van Coile, ‘Adequate fire safety for structural steel elements based upon life-time cost optimization’, Fire Safety Journal, p. 103095, May 2020
6.  R. Van Coile, G. Jomaas, and L. Bisby, ‘Defining ALARP for fire safety engineering design via the Life Quality Index’, Fire Safety Journal, vol. 107, pp. 1–14, Jul. 2019
7.  D. Hopkin, M. Spearpoint, and R. Van Coile, ‘The J-Value and Its Role in Evaluating Investments in Fire Safety Schemes’, Fire Technol, vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 1547–1564, Nov. 2018

Also, keep your eyes open for the next edition of SFPE Handbook where my guests are publishing a new chapter on "Economics and Decision Making in Fire Risk Analysis"

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 some resources for further learning:

• EGOLF webpage, and a direct link to EGOLF Round Robin studies
• A video of our lab, if you are curious on how the biggest furnaces we talked about look like
• The paper about the steel beam that Piotr has mentioned
• The paper about the shear response of deep precast/prestressed concrete hollow core slabs subjected to fire 
• The paper about the intumescent reaction mechanisms
• The paper about modifying the insulation criterion

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 seasons anymore, but wildfires become a threat all year round. I don't want to jump to unsupported conclusions, but damn, the prominence of wildfires seems to be the consequence of climate change that we will see soonest, and will hurt us a lot.

In this episode, we take fire engineers into the world of WUI. We try to narrow down WHY fires coming from the outside are so dangerous and so different from threats we know. We discuss the paradigms of fire safety engineering and WUI preparedness, including defendable zones, threats from firebrands and the effects of wildfire smoke on the occupants. 

Finally, Michael shares with me his own experience with evacuating from a wildfire - a disturbing and interesting perspective of a fire scientist experiencing this first-hand. 

Please take a look at these wildfire and WUI resources:

• Michaels Fire Lab group webpage (with an endless amount of useful stuff in it)
• IBHS Wildfire Preparedness Guidance 
• NFPA Wildfire Division

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 attending American football (handegg?). Why evacuation is quicker in torrential rain than in fire, and how stimuli may drive the walking speeds as well. And how a beer tent helped uncover that!

John has mentioned a lot of resources that may be of interest.

The online course mentioned by John is available at: https://uwaterloo.ca/fire-research-and-safety/fire-safety-program and a course outline may be found here.
Learn more about the York Fire Engineering group at https://yorkufire.com/
The  SFPE Foundation report cited in the episode can be found here.

A list of relevant papers is available below:

1.  Chin, K., Young, T., Chorlton, B., Aucoin, D., and Gales, J., (2022) Crowd Behaviour in Canadian Football Stadia - Part 1 - Data Collection. Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering (Canadian Science Publishing). 49 (7)
2. Chin, K., Young, T., Chorlton, B., Aucoin, D., and Gales, J., (2022) Crowd Behaviour in Canadian Football Stadia - Part 2 - Modelling Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering (Canadian Science Publishing). 49 (7)
3.  Yerushalami, A., Folk, L., Carton, H., Gales, J., Khan A., Weckman, B. (2022) Fire Evacuation Modelling of a Canadian Wildland Urban Interface Community. Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering (Canadian Science Publishing). 49 (1) 
4.  Arce, S., Jeanneret, C., Gales, J, Antonellis, D., and Vaiciulyte, S. (2021) Human Behaviour in Informal Settlement Fires in Costa Rica. Safety Science (Elsevier). 142. 105384. 
5. Young, T., Gales, J, Kinsey M, and Wong W. (2021) Variability in Stadia Evacuation under Normal, High-Motivation, and Emergency Egress. Journal of Building Engineering (Elsevier). 40 
6.  Folk, L., Gonzales, K., Gales, J., Kinsey, M, and Carratin, E. and Young, T. (2020) Emergency Egress for the Elderly in Care Home Fire Situations. Fire and Materials (John Wiley). 44(4): 595- 606. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 fact - how can we tell what they provide if we are not evaluating them in a clear and robust way?

In this episode, I talk to my colleague from the ITB - Dr Grzegorz Krajewski, about a next-generation smoke control experimental facility that has just been built at the ITB. From this talk, you will learn what doubts we have about the modern approach to designing smoke control in corridors, how we want to study it with our new facility and how you can take part in defining a new 'point zero' for the future of the smoke control.

If you like what you hear, and you would like us to conduct a specific experiment in the new facility, please reach us! We will do everything we can to run it.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 the handbook published recently (Book website). We discuss why some buildings bring more challenges than others, and how different the mass timber compartment fire can be from a contemporary noncombustible structure. What do we know about the behaviour of timber, how engineers can predict that behaviour and how that knowledge is put into practice? This episode is not about the book, it is about a mindset of how to safely approach the challenges lying ahead.

Oh, and about that book I've mentioned... The best part - the Authors and sponsors have paid for it and it is accessible online. No tricks. You can download the pdf right here. Enjoy!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 experimental data - if so, do you know the experimental and numerical uncertainties that allow you to actually compare them? If not, how can you tell if the second try in the mesh sensitivity study is a disturbing result or something well within the numerical uncertainty?

Oh boy, such a simple question and so many things to answer.

And you have guessed it - that is what we are trying to do in this podcast episode with dr Jason Floyd of the UL Fire Safety Research Institute. And on top of that, you will learn a ton about mesh sensitivity and model uncertainties.  You will also know why some models are more difficult than others - especially when you start to play with fluid-solid interaction and pyrolysis.

This episode was inspired by Bryan Klein - props to Bryan! He was a guest on the podcast and we have covered a very similar topic in it - you may want to listen to it as well! The trigger to make this episode came from the issue tracker, and you may want to check that thread as well 

If you have some great podcast episode ideas, let me know! I'll get this done, I'm doing this whole thing for you.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 done. If you think about it - it is obvious. PPE protects the heat transfer...both ways! You won't heat up, but you cannot really cool down either. 

This is something that every firefighter knows (feels), but why we - fire engineers should think about that? When we design a building, we design it for firefighter accessibility. We provide them with tools to reach the place of fire and begin efficient extinguishing actions. But what if just getting to the place where the fire is, is so physically exhausting, that efficient actions are unlikely to be carried out? Do we ever think that when we design a risky environment on the 30th floor or 5 floors below the ground? Or when our landscrapers have such vast walking distances, that mistaking an entrance may be an error that costs you dozens of minutes? Boy was I uneducated in this regard, and I am really thankful to Denisse and Gavin for teaching me some really important lessons they have learnt through decades of experiments in this field.

If you would like to learn more, you should check out the websites of their respective institutions, as they are filled with great resources on this subject:

• University of Illinois Fire Service Institute
• UL Fire Safety Research Institute
• UL Fire Safety Research Institute Academy

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 contamination. A piece that deals with the complexities of the modern world, sustainability and resilience. One that considers product lifecycle assessment as much as the toxicity of its combustion products. A holistic view gives us fire engineers a different lens to view our work through.

In this episode, I interview Brian and Margaret on why this handbook came to life.  That why is probably the most important question to be asked. If there was no reason, why go through all this effort to structurize and condense the knowledge we have so far amassed? If why does not exist, why would anyone go through the hassle of considering one more (difficult) thing in their project?

Well, I hope I won't spoil the episode, but the why exists. And it is a pretty good one. And to learn it, you have to dig into this episode!

You can find the handbook here:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-94356-1#about-this-book

It is behind a paywall, but many universities and institutes should have free access!

The publisher describes this handbook as:
The fundamental purpose of this handbook is to raise awareness about the environmental impacts of fire and fire suppression, primarily within the fire engineering and firefighting communities, but also within the environmental engineering and planning disciplines. The Handbook provides readers with a fundamental understanding of the problem and its magnitude and includes a set of tools and methods for assessing environmental, social and financial impacts, and a set of tools for identifying and selecting appropriate mitigation options.

• Presents previously unavailable material on identification, assessment and mitigation of environmental fires
• Facilitates readers with knowledge in one area to focus on topics where they lack expertise
• Extensively cites detailed studies and reports to support in-depth study in each of the topic areas

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 design at Massey University. Having two experts - one a developer, and the other a user of BIM I try to get balanced answers on what BIM means for Fire Safety Engineering and how will it impact our future. And I must say I am surprised by the answers - I was pretty sure we will spend an hour talking about issues with transferring the models, but after this talk, this whole BIM environment seems like a pretty good idea!

I hope you will also enjoy this journey through the near and a bit future of BIM technology. Looking forward to hear back from you about your BIM journeys, thoughts and ideas on how make this the technology of the future FSE.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 glazing technologies for building facades, is it really okay to assume that the glazing has failed and all we are left is a giant hole that allows the air flow inside? How does the glass fail, and when and what exactly are the consequences of this failure? These are the questions asked to professor Wang Yu of the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) at USTC, China. Yu takes me through his research from his PhD at Edinburgh, and through more recent experiments carried out by his group in China. We discuss FEM modelling of glass and some specific behaviour of modern glazing technologies exposed to different kinds of fires.

If you would like to learn more about this fundamental topic, here are some great further reading resources (Yu has so far 29 papers on this subject and these are just the tip of the iceberg!):

• Experimental study on fallout behaviour of tempered glass façades with different frame insulation conditions in an enclosure fire
• Investigation of the thermal response and breakage mechanism of point-supported glass facade under wind load
• Determination of critical fallout condition of tempered glass in an enclosure fire
• The effect of glass panel dimension on the fire response of glass façades
• Crack evolution process of window glass under radiant heating
• Determination of critical breakage conditions for double glazing in fire

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

[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 two things that meet their requirements within their respectable eco-systems gives a not such a fire-safe outcome after all... This is the difference between considering systems versus product characteristics, and in relation to the fire safety of PV panels, something truly unique to my today's guest - dr Jens Steemann Kristensen.

Jens has gone a long way from burning PV panels in a cone calorimeter to trying to understand the holistic behaviour of panels placed on the roof. Join me in learning about his journey, his doubts and findings, and most importantly - some really interesting findings in how the issue of fire-safe PV roofs can be solved.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 firefighting research legends - Dan Madrzykowski of the UL Fire Safety Research Institute and professor Charlie Fleischmann from the University of Canterbury.

After listening to this episode you must check the website of the UL FSRI! That is a vault fille with fire science gold, not to be missed by anyone passionate about fire safety.

And if you are here to find some info about the Fire Hose Prop we have discussed, seek no more - just follow this link to learn all about it.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, that the proof for this relationship can be found literally in our anatomy... 

The best way to study this origin would obviously be a time machine. I don't have that. But I have the second-best thing - a real scientist Dr Ivo Jacobs studying the relationship between animals and fire, to uncover how our ancestors could have learnt how to behave at the fire and how to use fire to their advantage. There is not much fire safety engineering in this episode, but there is something really magical to learning how impactful that thing we study was for our kind. And I hope you will really enjoy this.

And if this sparked your interest, go on and check these great resources:

• Beautiful essay on pyrocognition by Ivo (a must read tbh)
• Short video of Japaneese snow (fire!) monkeys at a campfire
• Study of New Caledonian crows

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 this discussion I get to ask some important questions on the role structural fire engineering plays in engineering modern buildings, and Thomas makes the point that it it the way forward in understanding the building performance in a holistic way. I learn about FDS-SAFIR integration (which is superb interesting!), challenges with new materials and the development of design fires (hint - travelling fires get a ton of mention, so be sure to also tag episode 27 with Guillermo Rein on them!). And as usual,  in the end, we geek on the future of fire science and technology. God, I love these discussions so much!!!

Make sure to check Thomas webpage at: https://mars.jhu.edu/

If you would like to learn more on structural fire engineering, Thomas has compiled a list of resources you should check:

• 45 min video lecture: Structures in Fire: using computational modelling to design structures for fire safety
• chapter on "Advanced Analysis" in the SFE Handbook
• 2017 paper on SAFIR
• 2019 paper on burnout resistance
• FDS-FEM modeling

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 firefighting experience into improved design. Where does he see the most immediate gain (duh - communication!), and how does a fire safety engineer seek knowledge.

And knowing that Dave builds his own machines and does his CFD, I would not be myself if we eventually did not venture into world of CPU's, BIM and difficult choices when managing uncertainties in commercial and scientific projects.

Join us in this multi-faceted episode, and hopefully enjoy the talk between two fire safety engineers, who are absolutely passionate about their work.

Oh, and make sure to check Dave's company - Performance Based Fire Protection Engineering webpage. Lots of great resources and more of them coming! 

https://www.pbfpe.com/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 TBM's, Hyperloops to city concepts build all the way around humans (and tunnels!). This is a future to look for, and I hope to live through at least some of these inventions. They will not come without challenges, but that is the point of being an engineer, right?!

This is the second part of two-piece interview with Professor Arnold Dix. If you can't get enough of Arnold (like me), I have great news for you. There are six episodes of the Tunneling Journal podcast exclusively with Arnold, that you can listen here: https://tunnellingjournal.com/podcasts-tunnelling-journal/ 

Highly recommended!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 the concept of safety and how one is delivered. A rejuvenating perspective in which we are mindful of our solutions and the goals we wish to achieve.

It may be too good to be true, but then again... it is not the first time the tunnelling industry is ahead of the curve. We are still discussing how to deal with risk methods, while for a long time it is a standard approach in tunnelling. We still wonder if buildings really need to survive burnout, while tunnelling talks about resiliency. We wonder which plume model to use in our atria, while tunnelling fully embraces PBD. These are just some examples, but they really highlight how this industry is on the leading edge in innovative and disruptive ways for fire safety. 

I hope you will enjoy this episode. There is a lot we can learn from the tunnelling industry, that we can implement at every end of fire safety. And if you like this talk  I have good news for you! Next week, join us for part 2. Innovative approaches in transportation, how will they change our cities and the landscape of fire protection engineering! An episode not to be missed.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 skill? Well press the play button and find it for yourself! The answer is 35 minutes away, and I promise this will not be a time wasted.

In this episode I have repurposed parts of other excellent interviews, each of them worth a listen (or a re-listen):

• https://www.firescienceshow.com/018-engineered-timber-with-danny-hopkin/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/015-global-view-on-the-fire-safety-from-a-starchitect-perpective-with-benjamin-ralph/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/023-risk-assessment-with-maximum-allowable-damage-with-jaime-cadena-gomez-and-david-lange/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/021-resilient-structural-design-for-firefighter-safety-with-ali-ashrafi/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/048-car-parks-design-fires-and-the-broad-world-of-fire-science-with-mike-spearpoint/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/024-whos-a-fire-safety-engineer-with-jimmy-jonsson/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 episodes from the past, which I have recommended in this short apology piece:

• https://www.firescienceshow.com/014-a-joyrney-through-the-scales-of-fire-phenomena-with-sara-mcallister/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/016-the-future-of-evacuation-modelling-with-enrico-ronchi-and-ruggiero-lovreglio/
• https://www.firescienceshow.com/029-busses-flammability-and-an-unknown-force-holding-good-solutions-back-with-anja-hofmann-bollinghaus/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 differently than a bunch of units in a crowd. But to what extent that 'different' could be important? That is the question with which I have approached dr Anne Templeton from the University of Edinburgh. Anne is a renowned scientist in the field of crowd psychology. She was kind enough to tell me the difference between psychological and physical crowds and why sending students to a pub helped here quantify that. Tap into this episode if you would like to learn the new stuff we are finding about human behaviour, and how that may change our future modelling and evacuation planning.

And make sure to check out Anne's webpage which is absolutely full of resources!
https://www.identitiesandcollectivebehaviour.com/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 firefighters view fire science (and how to make it more useful to them). And how engineers should view firefighting operations. You will learn a lot about the commanders' role and multiple not-so-obvious factors that go into consideration when battling a fire. From this talk, you will understand why risks related to high-rise (and large space) buildings are so different from simple structures.

I hope you appreciate this point of view. For me, it was very eye-opening. We need to be more sensitive to the needs of the firefighters, and more often include them in our discussion. At the same time, we need to find a way to communicate fire science and engineering to them, so they can fully benefit from the technologies we introduce with them in mind.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 listen. You have downloaded my content 25.000 times. And finally, I get to share with you some of my own science. Could not be happier! Thank you so much to Guillermo Rein for creating this opportunity for me.

I hope that the subject of my work is interesting to you. I have some papers to share, along with the most important ones that were mentioned in the episode. Psst...some of them are behind a paywall but I am MORE THAN HAPPY to share the copies with you, just send me a request through my ResearchGate profile :)

• Wind and Fire Coupled Modelling part 1 - Literature Review
• Wind and Fire Coupled Modelling part 2 - Best Practice Guidelines
• Hala Koszyki Case Study
• Worked out example of wind and fire study for SFPE PBD 2016
• Roof aerodynamics and natural ventilators
• Our first real wind and fire study! How wind changes performance of natural vents.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 the ones that are stored in warehouses and not fueling anything. Francesco takes me on a journey into the world of cathodes, anodes and electrol... I mean battery juice.  Knowing what is inside and why it burns is fundamental to understanding how can we protect the world from the risks arising from Li-ION batter technology. And I hope this podcast episode is a concise introduction to this!

And here is a paper choice curated by Francesco, containing the important papers discussed within the episode (because we discuss real science here! :))

1. X. He, C. Zhao, Z. Hu, F. Restuccia, F. Richter, Q. Wang, G. Rein. The effects of heat transfer on accelerating rate calorimetry of thermal runaway of Lithium-ion batteries, Process Safety and Environmental Protection, VVol 162, 2022, pp
   684-693. 
2. X.He, Z. Hu, F. Restuccia, H. Yuan, G. Rein. Self-heating ignition of large ensembles of Lithium-ion batteries during storage with different states of charge and cathodes, Applied Thermal Engineering, Vol 197,  2021, 117349.
   
   
3. Z. Hu, X. He, F. Restuccia, G. Rein. Anisotropic and homogeneous model of heat transfer for self-heating ignition of large ensembles of Lithium-ion batteries during storage, Applied Thermal Engineering, Vol 197, 2021, 117301. 3
4. P. Christensen, Z. Milojevic, M.S. Wise, M. Ahmeid, P.S. Attidekou, W. Mrozik, N.A. Dickman, F. Restuccia, S.M. Lambert, P.K. Das. Thermal and mechanical abuse of electric vehicle pouch cell modules, Applied Thermal Engineering,
   Vol 189 2021,116623
5. L. Diaz Bravo, X. He, Z. Hu, F. Restuccia, M. Marinescu, J. Barreras, Y. Patel, G. Offer, G. Rein. Meta-review of fire safety of Lithium-ion batteries: industry challenges and research contributions, Journal of the Electrochemistry
   Society Vol 167 090559, 2020. 
6. X. He, F. Restuccia, Y. Zhang, Z. Hu, X. Huang, J. Fang, G. Rein. Experimental study of self-heating ignition of lithium-ion batteries during storage: effect of the number of cells, Fire Technology, Vol 56, 2020, pp 2649–2669

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 parks, and car parking infrastructure in general. 

But wait for it, there is much more. The hidden underlying message about the broadness of fire science, and the holistic view on how certain compartments are used today (and how it differs from their past use). Delightfully refreshing point of view! Hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 design points and the properties of modern solutions available in the market. We also discuss the standardization of PDS systems in Europe, giving a glimpse into incoming EN 12101-6 and EN12101-13.

If you seek help with the design of pressurization systems for your buildings, feel free to contact Grzegorz @ [email protected] 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teknolink-gsypek/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 voice, you can start with this episode https://firecodetech.com/research-smoke-control-systems-and-cfd-with-wojciech-wgrzyski featuring yours truly :)

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 decipher together with prof. Ruben van Coile and prof. Danny Hopkin. It is an inspiring journey, and you can trust me on this - at the end the episode gets even better!

Also, Danny was kind enough to curate this fantastic list of resources for you to read, if you would like to build a more complete idea on the concepts of risk and safety:

1. D. Hopkin, R. Van Coile, and L. David, ‘Certain Uncertainty-Demonstrating safety in fire engineering design and the need for safety targets.’, SFPE Europe, 2017
2. R. Van Coile, D. Hopkin, D. Lange, G. Jomaas, and L. Bisby, ‘The Need for Hierarchies of Acceptance Criteria for Probabilistic Risk Assessments in Fire Engineering’, Fire Technol, vol. 55, no. 4, pp. 1111–1146, Jul. 2019
3. R. Van Coile, D. Hopkin, and D. Lange, Guest Editorial: Probabilistic Methods in Fire Safety Engineering. Springer US, 2019
4. R. Van Coile, N. Elhami Khorasani, D. Lange, and D. Hopkin, ‘Uncertainty in Structural Fire Design’, in International Handbook of Structural Fire Engineering, K. LaMalva and D. Hopkin, Eds. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021, pp. 323–411
5. D. Hopkin, I. Fu, and R. Van Coile, ‘Adequate fire safety for structural steel elements based upon life-time cost optimization’, Fire Safety Journal, p. 103095, May 2020
6.  R. Van Coile, G. Jomaas, and L. Bisby, ‘Defining ALARP for fire safety engineering design via the Life Quality Index’, Fire Safety Journal, vol. 107, pp. 1–14, Jul. 2019
7.  D. Hopkin, M. Spearpoint, and R. Van Coile, ‘The J-Value and Its Role in Evaluating Investments in Fire Safety Schemes’, Fire Technol, vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 1547–1564, Nov. 2018

Also, keep your eyes open for the next edition of SFPE Handbook where my guests are publishing a new chapter on "Economics and Decision Making in Fire Risk Analysis"

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 any outstanding issues with this emerging technology. In this episode, we go through the challenges at different scales of the battery system - from the chemistry of cathode, anode and electrolyte, through challenges in manufacturing and quality control, battery management systems up to the scale of whole off-grid systems. Each presents unique challenges. Each is a place of ongoing innovation. 

But the most important, IMHO, is to look at the threat holistically. Even if we remove all the intrinsic dangers of energy storage, the batteries may still be there when a fire starts for other reasons... We may be able to contain the 'thermal' threats, but are we looking for solutions to the smoke? And what to do with billions of already existing batteries that we deal with everywhere in our lives... All these questions got answered here, so you don't want to miss this episode!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, that I think we all acknowledge, but for some reason, we do not have? What are the dead ends and missing links... And how many of the ideas go to sleep for decades, just to be rediscovered as the field matures.

Please learn more about prof. Babrauskas on his webpage: www.doctorfire.com and his scientific paper repository at ResearchGate

The paper mentioned by Vyto - Some Neglected Areas in Fire Safety Engineering  

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

We all understand the dangers of smoke inhalation in fires. But what about the site of the fire a few days after it was put out? It looks clean, maybe even lost the smell... Is it something to worry about, or you can rush straight in, wearing your shorts and a t-shirt? Well, I guess I would not be that reckless, but if I can be honest - I don't think I would care that much about protecting myself either... At least that was me before the talk to dr Gavin Horn from UL FSRI.

Gavin spent more than a decade investigating the environment of post-fire scenes. And these places are where many of us work, almost on daily basis. Firefighters, investigators, fire researchers, constructors and demolished... And the scenes do certainly hide some threats within. In this episode you will learn a lot about them, and how these threats change as the environment evolves. More than that, Gavin is a pretty down-to-earth guy and does not imply you should dress for an investigation in a NASA space suit. You have to balance the risks related to contamination through inhalation and absorption, with risks of overheating, falling or cutting yourself, and as well with the capability to do the actual work wearing PPE. That is not the kind of discussion I get with my own H&S experts, and I appreciate this smart and holistic view a lot.

To learn more about the environment of fire scenes, you MUST read this excellent paper by Gavin Horn et. al. Airborne contamination during post-fire investigations: Hot, warm and cold scenes

You may also want to enter the gold mine of resources that Gavin has shared with me:

• UL FSRI resources on fire investigations
• University of Illinois Fire Service Institute
• Online training resources at UL FSRI

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

How reliable are sprinkler systems? Is it 100%? Is it 95%? Maybe it is 88%... actually, whatever the number is, do we truly understand what does it represent? What does it mean that a sprinkler has succeeded and what does it mean it failed. These are the questions that were behind my today's interview with Arnstein Fedoy.  You may remember Arnstein from his short appearance in episode 26 . This time, we've had the whole episode for this discussion, and I must say it was well invested hour on my side.

If you would like to learn more about sprinkler reliability, Arnstein also wrote a book exclusively on this topic:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/9780429287503/reliability-data-fire-sprinkler-systems-arnstein-fed%C3%B8y-ajit-kumar-verma

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

This week I've invited a guest, that I was looking to talk to for a good while... Dr Ingo Riess from Riess Ingenieur-GmbH is someone I look up to in the field of tunnel fire safety, in which I am very active in the last few years. In this chat, we had the chance to go through the concept of tunnel resiliency and calculate the risk related to the whole road network, rather than just a tunnel on its own. This is such a refreshing concept, in which the goal - maximizing public safety - is well defined, and thanks to that, smart decisions can be made. And these decisions are not always to make the tunnel a bit safer - in some cases, it may be just better to invest in other safety infrastructure. This holistic view opens new pathways and possibilities and makes investments in fire safety really reasonable. I absolutely love it, and it is something I wish we can implement in my own country.  Outside resilience, we also had a good chance to discuss the ventilation and modelling, design fires and some tough choices the engineers have to make when refurbishing tunnels. If you have anything to do with tunnels, this episode is definitely for you. And if you do not, still can be inspiring, as the world of tunnels is one the forefront of applying risk-based concepts in performance-based engineering. Something, that the rest of the world must eventually catch up.

Make sure to check Ingo's ResearchGate, where he stores all the magnificent reports we have talked about (and many more we did not).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ingo-Riess

Also, give a chance to the Graz  Tunnel Safety and Ventilation conference, which always delivers the best content related to the fire safety of tunnels:
https://www.tunnel-graz.at/

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

What does the future hold? Probably no one knows. But what happens in near future with some of the most popular tools used by the FSE community? That is a great question to a tool developer - Bryan Klein of Thunderhead Engineering, the company that brought us the most popular FDS pre-processor PyroSim and as popular evacuation model Pathfinder.

In this talk, we focus on CFD modelling, and the impact pre-and postprocessing tools had on our capabilities to tackle fire problems with our computers. Mesh resolution and creation techniques. Solver scalability and parallel processing. Most commonly requested tool additions. These are the things you will definitely find in this episode, plus much more!

And do not forget...

 September 12-14, 2022 in Brno, Czech Republic. Fire and Evacuation Modelling Technical Conference. You want to be there!

Keep your eyes on this space: https://www.femtc.com/events/2022

And in the meantime, take a look at the materials from past events at https://www.femtc.com/events/
and give a check to the Thunerhead Engineering!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

It is the third time we talk about mass timber and fire in this show, and I hope every time the message gets even more refined. In this episode, it is clear - fire resistance is not always enough. But why? You will learn that from dr Daniel Brandon from RISE who spent last years researching timber in fire. In this episode, we discuss the limitations of the fire resistance approach in testing timber structures, and also venture beyond it - how does exposed timber change the fire dynamics in a furnace and how in a real building? How the risk changes once you may have your structure participating in a fire, and why a 2-storey house is pretty safe, while a timber skyscraper brings challenges we have never met before. 

You may also want to view other important timber-in-fire discussions from the Fire Science Show:

• Episode 18 - Engineered timber with Danny Hopkin
• Episode 25 - Structural fire engineering with timber with Felix Weisner

Please check the resources provided by Daniel:

• Exposure from mass timber to facades
• Fire Safe implementation of visible mass timber in tall buildings – compartment fire testing
• Fire Safe Implementation of Mass Timber In Tall Buildings

And also, the most spectacular - see the large timber experiments on your own, to understand what Daniel meant with "the energy must go somewhere" - check this YouTube page

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

If you were investigating phenomena and built your whole narrative around a flawed and debunked concept, would that get published? Would that get cited? Would that be recognized? Many of us would say an obvious *no*, but that is not so obvious when we discuss the human behaviour field of science and the concept of panic (the p-word we do not say!). Even though among top evacuation scientists there seems to be a consensus about why this concept is flawed, every year we see more and more papers in which it is an underlining principle of the research...

And it is a symptom of a potentially worse issue. A complete misuse of models, lack of understanding of fundamentals or blind trust in data. All of these take precious time and resources from studies, that are really needed to push our understanding of human behaviour in fire forward.

Today I give the stage to Prof Enrico Ronchi, who has some tough things to say about the state of evacuation modelling in research. I think this message is important and should cause a moment of reflection on what are we doing, and is it the thing we should be doing.

As mentioned in the episode, a great companion to the podcast is the HBiF Webinar on the (mis)use ff controversial terminologies in evac. research with dr Anne Templeton and dr Milad Haghani.  More webinars by HBiF of IAFSS  are available on its Youtube site, and you may watch this space as it fills up with amazing content in near future! Or subscribe here to not miss any new webinar.

The second important resource is the paper Guidance for the Model Developer on Representing Human Behavior in Egress Models by SMV Gwynne, LM Hulse and MJ Kinsey. This paper covers the statements against which evacuation models may be validated.

Finally, make sure you have listened to previous great episodes covering human behaviour in fires and evacuation:

019 - Modelling human behaviour with Erika Kuligowski
016 - The future of evacuation modelling with Enrico Ronchi and Ruggiero Lovreglio
009 - Cognitive biases and decision making with Michael Kinsey

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this episode I was really happy to host two amazing researchers from UL FSRI - Dr Steve Kerber, the VP of Underwriter Laboratories and Director of UL Fire Safety Research Institute, and Dr Craig Weinschenk, research engineer and a data wizard. Together we venture into the world of fire research carried together with firefighters, with the critical goal of saving firefighter lives and reducing the damage caused by fire. Join us to learn how the largest full-scale fire experiments are performed and what is the recipe to learn the most from them, and share that knowledge in a most efficient manner.

UL FSRI shares tons of useful resources, all that can be found at their website https://fsri.org/ IMHO the most amazing of these resources is the fire investigation page with all the interactive results of large fire experiments. You must check this amazing resource out!

You may also want to check other resources provided by UL FSRI, starting with:

Live stream feed from one of their huge fire experiments
The amazing YouTube channel of UL FSRI
UL FSRI Training courses
and
Github repository with the data from fire experiments

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Building a fire-safe future is not an easy task. Including sustainability in that build, is even harder. But how hard is it to include fire safety in the discussion, when sustainability itself is a goal? Does sustainability even exist when fire safety is excluded? I think we have learned the hard way that that is not an option. Yet, so often dangerous innovations are introduced without consulting with fire experts. In this episode, we delve into this important and difficult matter with prof. Margaret McNamee of Lund University.

This episode is also an invitation for all Fire Science Show listeners to participate in the Special Issue of the Fire Technology journal: Fire Safety and Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities. Let's take the discussion started in this episode, and exchange the ideas within the fire community on what sustainability means for us, and how can we achieve it. We are looking forward to all of the submissions to this special issue. The deadline is 31st July 2022.

If you would like to connect with Margaret, you can do so through her Twitter and LinkedIn.
You may also want to read up on the  IAFSS Agenda for 2030 which also covers many of the issues related to sustainability discussed in this episode.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 organization, Kindling, which aims to deliver fire safety to all who do not have access to it. Including societies in low-income countries, people living in informal settlements and socially excluded citizens of the western world.

Kindlings' mission statement is:
"(...) to connect fire safety knowledge with local and global humanitarian and development efforts aimed at reducing the unequal impact of fire on people, property and livelihoods in vulnerable communities around the world."

It is a powerful message and an episode filled with hope and willingness to help others. If you ever wondered how a fire safety engineer could change the world, stop for a while and listen to this conversation.

If you want to learn more about this topic, you can connect with Danielle on her LinkedIn or Twitter and follow Kindling here.

Learn more about the Kindling mission and achievements in this report. 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 company INBEPO who are experts in carrying hot smoke tests. Together, we try to debunk the myths around the method and showcase its true strength - the ability to quickly verify the global behaviour of the fire safety automation within the building.

If you are interested more about the hot smoke testing, you can reach Piotr at [email protected] or through his LinkedIn and Janusz at  [email protected] 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 up on 12.01.2022!!!

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, this is often the world of fire engineering. And in this world, we make decisions based on what we know about systems - and when we don't know enough - we test it!

And for the water mist question, I've found the perfect person to give me some answers.  Johny Jessen from VID Fire Kill has visited me in my office and told me about his experience with full-scale fire tests of water mist systems in a tunnel, carried by Efectis. You know he is serious about what he is doing when you learn that the fire source used for this test was approx. 250 MW! This discussion goes deep into the testing and the differences between suppression systems and challenges that modern engineers face in landmark projects.

Johny has asked me to invite you to his LinkedIn profile, where he shares a lot of great resources related to water mist technology - so here you go! And the VID Fire Kill profile.

You may also like to check this whitepaper on the experiments carried in Spain that we discussed in this episode. More materials, including videos of the test, can be found on the project website.

I must also give a shoutout to friends at Efectis who have done some really great job engineering these fire tests! From one fire science enthusiast to another, hats down.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, so it seems we're in a great place.

Well. Not really. Our models for this are quite bad. And there is no one reason for that - from physics, through the assumptions, commonly used constants (magical numbers if you prefer that name) to implementation of this approach into CFD, which was never foreseen by its creators. Together with prof Lukas Arnold we have figured out that this requires not only an improvement but preferably - a complete revamp. After that, we have written a grant application, and guess what - WE GOT IT!!!

In this episode, you will learn everything about the faults of the visibility in the smoke model and how we intend to change it. Please join us in this discussion, and if you have some great ideas on how to make our work better, please be sure to tell us! We are listening and looking forward to changing the FSE together, forever.

As we are just starting, please feel welcome to check existing resources by our teams on the visibility in smoke:

• Fire Science Show Episode 3 with Gabriele Vigne - there is this crazy fire podcast that covers so much!
•  My presentation at UK Fire and Smoke Modelling Forum on YouTube with a lot of background on how the model works (or rather, why it does not work)
• Robust value of Soot Yield for complex materials found at 0.1 with Gabriele Vigne
• Multi-wavelength sensitivity of the smoke obscuration models by W. Wegrzynski et al.
• How to measure visibility in a small scale? by W. Wegrzynski et al.
• A map representation of ASET-RSET by B. Schroeder et al.
• Spatiotemporal measurement of light extinction coefficients in compartment fires by L. Arnold et. al

This research was funded in part by National Science Centre, Poland in the grant OPUS 2020/39/I/ST8/03159.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 hearing the full story that my guest, dr Anja Hofmann-Böllinghaus has to deliver. It is a journey through the world of the resistance to fire and at the same time the frustration and challenges that fire engineers have to go through. And above everything, it is a call for making busses and other means of mass transport safer, by employing the knowledge and solutions we already have!

If you liked it, please take a minute to connect with Anja on her Twitter and LinkedIn 

If you would like to learn more about the fire safety of means of transport, please check out these items:

• Anja Hofmann, Steffen Dülsen, Michael Försth, Jonas Brandt. What can we learn from European train fire safety regulations for fire safety regulations for busses? FIVE 2018, October 2dn – 3rd 2019, Boras, Sweden - in proceedings of FIVE 2018
• Krueger, Simone; Hofmann, Anja; Berger, Anka; et al. Investigation of smoke gases and temperatures during car fire - large-scale and small-scale tests and numerical investigations
• Anja Hofmann, Steffen Dülsen, Georg Scholzen. Rapid fire spread in a bus depot fire. FIVE (Fire in vehicles) Conference 2014, October, 1-2, 2014 in Berlin - in proceedings of FIVE 2014
• A. Hofmann, S. Dülsen, A. Klippel. Problems in bus fire safety – recent developments and possible solutions. Fire and Materials Conference, 28.-30.1.2013, San Francisco, USA

Also, please check the website of the Fires In VEchicles (FIVE) conferences, which is possibly the best place to learn about the issues and solutions within this sector  - https://www.ri.se/en/five

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 multiple choices to take - am I even trying supervised or unsupervised learning? Is my problem a regression or classification? I won't lie, it's hard already, and I have not even really started yet.

And then comes him. Dressed in white (just kidding). MZ Naser.

MZ is not only a genius who seems to have figured it out in the world of fire, but he is also documenting every step of his path in research papers. More to that, he also wrote a bunch of entry-level papers, and a review paper summarizing the basics and explaining the core concepts. Wow, what a service to the community! Please join me in this discussion in MZ, where he literally walks me through the fascinating world of AI in fire and explains where to start.

At this point of the show notes, I would list you a bunch of papers and relevant resources.
(Update: originally  there  was  just link to MZ’s site, but as this got published you totally need to start with this paper:  https://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1007/s10694-021-01210-1 )

 MZ Naser is so nice, he has a website where all of this is summarized and kept updated! If I started listing the resources, I would do you a disservice... You have to test what he has out there.

https://www.mznaser.com/

And also, please connect with MZ at his Twitter and LinkedIn 

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 elements in the same way as a flashover is. And that is how we considered it for many years...

But there was a gap. Something between a localized fire and a flashover'd fire. For many years we've seen it, but we have not acknowledged it fully untill it was given a name - the Travelling Fire. In today's episode, I have invited prof. Guillermo Rein of Imperial College London, to tell us the origin story, recent developments and future plans related to this methodology. This should be interesting to all - from fire scientists to engineers.  IMHO, a well invested hour of your time!

Make sure to connect with Guillermo on socials:
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
and with his group - Imperial Hazelab (also on Twitter).

Guillermo has published 200 research papers, and among them many landmark pieces on travelling fires that I recommend:

• Travelling fires for structural design (2012) with J. Stern-Gottfried
• Improved formulation of Travelling Fires (2015) with E. Rackauskaite et al.
• Improved Travelling Fire Methodology - iTFM (2017) with E. Rackauskaite
• Computational analysis of thermal and structural failure criteria of a multi-storey steel frame exposed to fire (2019) with E. Rackauskaite et al.
• Flame extension and the near field under the ceiling for travelling fires inside large compartments (2020) with M. Heidari et al. 
• Fire Experiment Inside a Very Large and Open-Plan Compartment: x-ONE (2021) with E. Rackauskaite et al. 
• Thermal Response of Timber Slabs Exposed to Travelling Fires and Traditional Design Fires (2021) with F. Richter et al.

and some many more... You may also be interested in the relevant PhD thesis:
- Jamie Stern-Gottfried (2011)
- Egle Rackauskaite (2017)

And some other work related to travelling fires carried across the world:

• RK Janardhan and S Hostikka When the fire is spreading and when it travels? 
• X Dai et. al. Extended Travelling Fire Methodology
• D Hopkin

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, and I must say I have learnt a lot about water mist technology. Out of all talks, the one I have enjoyed the most was probably the talk by Arnstein Fedøy on sprinkler reliability. You will hear more about this in the podcast episode and you can also check Arnstein's book on sprinkler reliability. For me, the runner up was Max Lakkonen who discussed the use of numerical modelling in the water mist world, but I admit, I am biased. The CFD is my world and I love hearing a different perspective from a different industry. It was refreshing to hear Max's balanced stance on what can and what cannot be done. I regret not interviewing him, but at least I have discussed the matter with Alex Palle - one of the leaders of the water mist industry from VID Fire Kill. Alex told me what's all the fuzz with the EN standard, and why it is such an important step for the community.

I wish I could cover every talk that was given, as their technical level was really good, and I have enjoyed all of them. Hopefully, some of these resources will be made publically available, and if not, keep your eyes open for the next IWMA conference in 2022 (I've heard it will be in Madrid).

In the meantime, if you would like to learn more about water mist technology, the IWMA website is full of great resources, which I highly recommend exploring. Starting with How does the watermist work? by Bettina McDowell and other seminar papers shared on the site. You should also check their position papers on the water mist technology.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 thermodynamics of char layers... I will be honest - this is not an easy episode. But that is how it is supposed to be. Because this topic is not easy. You cannot proxy all of these considerations with simple fire resistance. You cannot pretend these issues do not exist.

So the next time someone writes on LinkedIn that "wood in fire is stronger than steel" please send them a link to this episode, with a comment that it is not that simple...

You should definitely follow Felix on Twitter, where you can learn a lot about timber in fire and be updated with the progress on the National Centre for Timber Durability and Design Life.

To arm you up with some resources, please check Felixs' PhD Thesis on "Structural behaviour of cross-laminated timber elements in fires".

In terms of papers interesting ones to read on the structural reductions in the cooling phase are: 

• Wiesner et al, Structural capacity in fire of laminated timber elements in compartments with exposed timber surfaces – for a theoretical consideration of the problem based on real temperatures. The predictions of capacity loss for the glulam column are from tests that were done for a real building.
•  Wiesner et al, Structural Capacity of One-Way Spanning Large-Scale Cross-Laminated Timber Slabs in Standard and Natural Fires where they've validated the model from the paper above in follow up tests by CERIB
• And they have also checked the recovery potential of heated stiffness loss in the following paper (which originated from my PhD). There was no recovery! There was a big dependency on the adhesive type and ply thickness in the loss in structural capacity, which was kind of the whole theme of the PhD - Wiesner, Deeny, and Bisby, Influence of ply configuration and adhesive type on cross-laminated timber in flexure at elevated temperatures

 In terms of testing of structural wall elements, there is the following paper, which kind of then kickstarted a lot of Felixs' PhD research. He says "I was very fortunate to have worked with great Masters students on this and other projects" Wiesner, Randmael, Wang, Bisby, and Hadden Structural response of cross-laminated timber compression elements exposed to fire)

 Also, if your listeners are interested in outcomes from sitting hours in front of a Universal Test machine and waiting for the wood to heat up to specified temperatures before crushing it then they might be interested in the following paper:  (Wiesner, Thomson and Bisby, The effect of adhesive type and ply number on the compressive stren

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 Directors. Jimmy has led an SFPE "Core Competencies" task group which created a reference document - Recommended Minimum Technical Core Competencies for the Practice of Fire Protection Engineering. 

In our talk, we dive deep into the competencies of fire engineers, and to what particular tasks these competencies are required. You will learn where one can obtain the broad view over a fire science, and why Jimmy would rather hire someone with wide but shallow knowledge, over a specialist without a fire engineering background.

If you are looking for more resources, SFPE has some goodies for you:

• almost every good FPE university has now an SFPE Student Chapter, and you can find the list of all of such chapters here
• Pathways to a career in FPE
• Higher education in FPE

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, Transurban) and Dr David Lange from UQ, who will introduce us to the Maximum Allowable Damage risk assessment methodology. Two unique things about this approach are:
1) you calculate the inherent risk of your building, and start working towards solutions from this point, making the whole engineering process better aligned with delivery of a *true* safety, rather than compliance.
2) you focus on the process and not on the measure. This means you understand the building so much better, can include other parties and authorities in the process.

If you are a Fire Safety Engineer you should listen to this episode. Even if the method will not be useful for you, the discussion is definitely refreshing.

Connect to my guests:
Jaime Cadena on Linkedin
David Lange on Linkedin

A short introduction to Jaime's work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6YOBkS9Uds

Read more on the Maximum Allowable Damage methodology at:

•  Jaime's PhD thesis
• Cadena et al. Overcoming risk assessment limitations for potential fires in a multi-occupancy building
• Cadena et al. Uncertainty-based decision-making in fire safety: Analyzing the alternatives

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 of the fire phenomena with Sara McAllister (USDA).  Today's episode is in a way follow up to that journey, as with Michael we try to understand why slope angle is such an important variable in the ignition of solids (and why peakHRR is not necessarily at the same slope as peak fire spread!).  We venture into wind-driven crown fires and ember generation within them. Finally, we discuss the fire whirls, and notably - Michaels team discovery of "blue fire whirl" during his time in UMD. Although the topics seem very fundamental, we stay in touch with engineering... In the end, the influence of slope angle on the flame spread is interesting, and at the same time fundamental to predicting wildfire spread. Firebrand aerodynamics is fascinating, but if we don't understand that, we won't be able to build homes resilient to wildfires. Blue whirl is beautiful, but one day it may be the answer to efficient cleaning of oil spills. This episode is full of fantastic fire science, for everyone!

Connect with Michael on Twitter and LinkedIn

Check the collection of resources for fire protection engineers on Firelab Berkeley website.

Read up on Michaels research:

• Studies on upward flame spread (PhD Thesis at UCSD)
• M Finney et. al. Role of buoyant flame dynamics in wildfire spread PNAS
• A Tohidi, MJ Gollner, H Xiao, Flame Whirls Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics
• H Xiao, MJ Gollner, ES Oran, From fire whirls to blue whirls and combustion with reduced pollution PNAS

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 environment, which acts as a battleground for them, affects their actions and options. And we can design buildings better!

My today's guest, dr Ali Ashrafi of Thornton Tomasetti is passionate about building safer buildings. Ali highlights the key elements of making the building safer for firefighters, with a great focus on the structural resilience of the buildings. Highlighting the performance-based design approach he claims that we can build not only better but also cheaper at the same time. Well, that's kind of a win-win situation... If you want to learn more, this episode is for you.

Learn more about Ali at:
https://www.thorntontomasetti.com/person/ali-ashrafi

And connect with him through LinkedIn

Followup material:

• A presentation about Performance-Based Design of Buildings in Fire: Implications for Firefighting
• Performance-based structural fire design: Exemplar Design guide developed by ASCE and Charles Pankow Foundation
• Dan Madrzykowski Using Fire Dynamics Research to Save Firefighters
• Stephen Kerber, Dan Madrzykowski Fire Behavior and Tactical Considerations
• NIST & UL Research on Fire Behavior & Fireground Tactics

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 fire scientists I confirm - Brian has a great point in seeking the breakthrough in a change on how we perceive fire safety.

It is a socio-technical system. A part of a much larger system of the built environment. If we don't learn how to treat it as such a system, if we continue to live in our silo separated from the rest of the engineering branches, there is not much that can change.

This is an important episode. It does not give you easy wins or short answers. But it certainly provokes you to think about what role do you play in the big picture. And to realize that, I reckon it is worth an hour of your time.

Learn more about Brian at his webpage:
https://meachamassociates.com/
or connect through LinkedIn

Brian is currently the Chairman of the IAFSS and past President of SFPE. Are you a member of these organizations? If not, maybe you should! Learn more at:
https://www.iafss.org/
https://www.sfpe.org/home

Here are some chosen papers by Brian, illustrating how his concepts evolved over time:

• (1999) International experience in the development and use of performance-based fire safety design methods: Evolution, current situation and thoughts for the future
• (2005) Performance-based building regulation: Current situation and future needs
• (2010) Accommodating innovation in building regulation: Lessons and challenges
• (2013) Twenty years of performance-based fire protection design: Challenges faced and a look ahead
• (2018) A socio-technical system framework for risk-informed performance-based building regulation

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 human behaviour, but in a vastly more complex way than we consider in buildings.
 
How risk perception threshold impacts when people choose to evacuate?
What mode of transport do they pick?
What interim travels do they take?
Where do they go?
Where do they stay when reaching their target?

These are just a few of the questions a modeller has to answer, and we will try to find out how Erica handles them within her modelling.

If you think this episode will be helpful only to wildfire scientists, you are very wrong. The concepts here are groundbreaking, and if such modelling enters the mainstream, we will soon use the same concepts and ideas in buildings. So, listen carefully; this is our future.

Connect with Erica at:
https://twitter.com/ericakul
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erica-kuligowski-25261436/

Check the awesome WUINITY project:
https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-tools/Wildland-Urban-Interface/WUINITY-a-platform-for-the-simulation-of-wildland-urban-interface-fire-evacuation
And read the WUINITY paper.

--- Useful links ---

• *new* Modelling evacuation of Kincade fire
• Modelling Household Evacuation Behaviour during Bushfires, presented by Dr Erica Kuligowski - Webinar
• Chimney Tops 2 fire paper
• Calibrating wildfire decision model
• Decision making in wildfires - Erica's position paper

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 Consultants. Danny did his PhD on the subject of timber in fire and has participated in multiple interesting research projects on this topic. He is currently working with the Structural Timber Association on a STA-SIG CLT project on unravelling the fire behaviour of CLT, with its experimental part carried at the ITB in Poland.

If you would like to learn more about the STA-SIG CLT project, please visit the project website at:
https://www.structuraltimber.co.uk/sectors/clt-special-interest-group

Or read the introduction to the project by Dr Danny Hopkin.

Very quick and critical reading material:
STA-SIG CLT group - Compliance Road-map for the Structural Fire Safety Design of Mass Timber Buildings in England
A. Law - Burnout means burnout

Connect with Dr Danny Hopkin at:
https://twitter.com/DannyHopkin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyjhopkin/
[email protected]

--- Useful links ---

This talk was a goldmine of resources, and here are all of them (I hope I did not miss out on something!)

Ronquillo G., Hopkin D., Spearpoint M., Review of large-scale fire tests on cross-laminated timber
Hopkin D., Anatsasov S., Brandon D., Reviewing the veracity of a zone-model-based-approach for the assessment of enclosures formed of exposed CLT
Hopkin D., Schmid J., Friquin K.L. Timber structures subject to non-standard fire exposure - Advances & challenges

Wegrzynski W. et al., The discrepancies in energy balance in furnace testing, a bug or a feature?

CROSS UK Cross-laminated timber (CLT) in multi-storey buildings
CROSS UK The risk of collapse of multi-storey CLT buildings during a fire
Angus Law and Luke Bisby, The rise and rise of fire resistance, Fire Safety Journal
We need to talk about timber - Angus Law gives the lecture for IStructE

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 social campaigns we can achieve safety from the threat, that seems more imminent than ever before.

But the discussion is not only about the politics and tactics. It is also about diversity, human aspect of fire science and social constructs that highly impact the fire risks. It is about a fascinating journey, for which dr Stoof has taken 15 (sic!) PhD students scattered all over the world, trained in over two dozen scientific units, who will be the foundation for the new generation of interdisciplinary fire experts.

PyroLife as a project has some ambitious goals and sets a new benchmark on career management, interdisciplinary research and research communication. It is focused on moving the paradigm from fire resistance to fire resilience, through risk quantification, management and communication. This part of project description summarizes it the best: 

"PyroLife is built upon four axes of diversity: interdisciplinarity, intersectorality, geography, and gender.  Its unique integrated training program provides 15 early stage researchers the in-depth, interdisciplinary, integrated and transferable knowledge and skills required to successfully complete their research projects and maximize their future employability. In a field that is still male-dominated, PyroLife is characterized by strong female participation not just as a gender equity goal but as a strategy to stimulate creativity and changing the way that fire is approached, moving from fire resistance to landscape resilience, and fostering community resilience with participatory approaches."

Please learn more about the Pyrolife ITN project at:
PyroLife project website

and connect at: 

• PyroLife Twitter 
• Cathelijne's Twitter 

Some supplementary items to our discussion can be found at:

• Diversity helps fight wildfires
• The role of fire in UK peatland and moorland management: the need for informed, unbiased debate
• Prescribed burning in southern Europe: Developing fire management in a dynamic landscape
  
  

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 figure out how fundamental the fundamental diagrams are, and should they be so fundamental? We discuss the emerging trends and technologies - AR and VR in research and training, smart readiness of buildings and new modes of communication. We also touch on the role of modelling and how it should evolve in the future. The episode also touches on CFD-Evacuation coupling, wildfire evacuation and informal settlements. A real action-packed episode filled with useful ideas and information.

If you wish to connect with my guests, you can find them at:
Enrico Ronchi: 
https://twitter.com/Enrico_Evac
https://www.linkedin.com/in/enrico-ronchi-74855a12/

Ruggiero Lovreglio:
https://twitter.com/r_lovreglio
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruggiero-rino-lovreglio-75a61659/

And the 'Evacuation Modelling' feeds:
https://twitter.com/EvacuationModel

Some of the research mentioned in the episode can be found here:

• Augmented reality for pedestrian evacuation research: Promises and limitations by Lovreglion and Kinateder
• Dissuasive exit signage for building fire evacuation by Olander et al.
• A pre-evacuation database for use in egress simulations by Lovreglio et al.
• WUI-NITY: a platform for the simulation of wildland-urban interface fire evacuation
• Mobile-powered head-mounted displays versus cave automatic virtual environment experiments for evacuation research by Ronchi et al.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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, and when some of the most prominent decisions are taken.

Creating a fire-safe architecture, especially when you are a global company, is not easy. This is why I have invited Benjamin Ralph - the head of fire safety at the Forster+Partners architectural office, one of the "STARchitect" offices designing the most interesting buildings in the world. In the episode, we  talk about the challenges related to working in a global village, the drivers of fire safety and the role of fire safety and other competing objectives in shaping the modern buildings.

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 journey across the scales of fire phenomena, discussing what are the key phenomena at particular scales. From matchsticks, through cribs and compartment fires, to wildfires and megafires – probably the most comprehensive discussion on the scales of fire phenomena I’ve ever had. From this episode you will also learn a lot about burning down wood cribs and about the LOF&BE initiative within the International Association for Fire Safety Science.

Learn more about Sara at:

https://www.firelab.org/profile/mcallister-sara

Connect with Sara at LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-mcallister-90b76917/

 LOF&BE group of IAFSS:
https://iafss.org/lofbe-webinar-series/

--- LinkedIn discussion ---

 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fire-science-show_014-a-joyrney-through-the-scales-of-fire-activity-6833641588724432896-ZEhW

--- Useful links ---

The groundbreaking paper on role of convective heat transfer in the spread of wildfires:

https://www.pnas.org/content/112/32/9833

Prof. Rein explaining why it is a breakthrough:

https://www.pnas.org/content/112/32/9795

Videos of the experiments:

https://movie-usa.glencoesoftware.com/video/10.1073/pnas.1504498112/video-1

https://movie-usa.glencoesoftware.com/video/10.1073/pnas.1504498112/video-2

https://movie-usa.glencoesoftware.com/video/10.1073/pnas.1504498112/video-3

Papers on wood cribs:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10694-015-0536-4

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10694-015-0543-5

1000 MW fire experiment:

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/61/7/1520-0477_1980_061_0682_iavawa_2_0_co_2.xml

Our paper summarizing the research on wildfires and the role of wind in wildfire spread:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-018-0748-5

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 episode with Dr Wolfram Jahn, we go deep into the application of the CFD in fire science and engineering, searching for the boundary at which the CFD stops being the right tool for the job. From the evolution of our models, through the choice of meshes and boundary conditions, up to the workflow of the CFD modelling, we touch the important choices the engineers do every day. Focusing on the practical side of the issue, we try to figure out the best advice we can give to the engineers, on how to use the CFD in the most reliable (and correct) way.

Connect with Wolfram Jahn at:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolframjahn/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/wolfris
ResearchGate - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wolfram-Jahn-2

--- LinkedIn Discussion thread ---
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fire-science-show_episode-13-on-the-use-and-abuse-of-cfd-activity-6831120537499025408--nvl

--- Usefull links ---

FDS download (make sure to check the example cases and the Verification & Validation guide!!!) - https://pages.nist.gov/fds-smv/downloads.html

Benjamin Ralph on V&V of FDS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipnGrAeG5zw

Summer School on FDS modelling at Juelich Forszungszentrum 
https://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/ias-7/EN/Research/Fire_Dynamics/Events/SummerSchool2019/_node.html

Dalmarnock paper (simulations before the experiment) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379711209000034?via%3Dihub

Dalmarnock paper (simulations after the experiment) -  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036013231000332X?via%3Dihub

50 years of Computational Wind Engineering - a view on the world of the CFD through a wind engineering eyes - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016761051400052X

Wegrzynski & Tofiło - Hand calculations, zone models and CFD – areas of disagreement and limits of application in practical fire protection engineering @ SFPE Warsaw 2016 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305808429_Hand_calculations_zone_models_and_CFD_-_areas_of_disagreement_and_limits_of_application_in_practical_fire_protection_engineering

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 President of SFPE Europe.

Due to his unique background, I've asked Kees some important questions related to the state of modern fire science, industrial research and development and legislation. We (attempt to) focus our discussion on how these puzzles play together, and how people representing these roles can and should interact... but we also venture into the wonderful world of tunnel fire safety, obtaining funds for major research projects in EU and how to educate the new generation of fire technicians and engineers. Also, why do pubs play a critical role in fostering healthy discussions between fire safety professionals?

This was certainly one of the most fun discussions I've had in a while, and I hope you will enjoy it as well. Even though it may not have a direct impact on your everyday work or research, the matters brought up in this talk will definitely affect your future in one way or another.  The importance of passion in fire engineering and being open to other professionals, also these representing completely different roles, is critical for building a fire safe world, together.

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LinkedIn Discussion Thread:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fire-science-show_environment-innovation-research-activity-6828586364817203200-Q28i

Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 looking for? Often temperature measurements become a proxy for heat transfer or energy balance problems, which in many cases are the things that we are looking for. In this episode, I'm going to talk about the wonderful world of heat transfer in fires, temperature measurements and its role in Fire Science and Fire Safety Engineering. In the end, I will give you four pieces of advice on how to improve the understanding of what you are measuring, so hopefully, you will stay with me till the end!

--- LinkedIn discussion thread ---
 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/fire-science-show_011-why-temperature-is-so-easy-to-measure-activity-6826039859526856704-Np2T 

--- Useful links ---

Papers mentioned in the episode:
J. Torero, A. Law, C. Maluk - Defining the thermal boundary condition for protective structures in fire: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0141029616311841
E. Rackauskaite - Improved travelling fires methodology (PhD thesis) https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/handle/10044/1/52917
M. Heidari, P. Kotsovinos, G. Rein - Flame extension and the near field (...) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/fam.2773
M. Beshir et al. - Semi-empirical model for estimating the heat release rate required for flashover (...) thermally-thin boundaries (...) - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0379711220300862?via%3Dihub

Incropera's Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Fundamentals+of+Heat+and+Mass+Transfer%2C+8th+Edition-p-ES81119320425
U. Wickstrom - Temperature Calculation in Fire Safety Engineering https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319301709

J. Toreros lecture 5 at Princeton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdNGV9jYAU0
(the whole course: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbInEHTmP9VZjxk0XxzflwUwbCTqzcI_w)