Fire Science Show

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

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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

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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/

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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!

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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.

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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/

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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/

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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/

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 @ gsypek@gmail.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teknolink-gsypek/

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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 :)

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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"

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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!

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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  

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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

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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

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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/

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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!

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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. 

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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 piotr@inbepo.pl or through his LinkedIn and Janusz at  janusz@inbepo.pl 

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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!!!

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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.

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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.

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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

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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 

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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 Testing the single zone structural fire design hypothesis
• C Maluk

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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.

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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 strength retention of CLT at elevated temperatures). Again we found that adhesive is an important factor in determining failure temperatures in CLT. Also a big difference between transient and steady-sta

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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/
Danny.Hopkin@OFRConsultants.com

--- 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
Angus Law and Rory Hadden - We need to talk about timber

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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
  
  

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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)



 

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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 that the standard temperature-time curve, which is the underpinning of the fire resistance of assemblies, is over 100 years old? Once you know that, you cannot stop but think about how this affects modern construction works. In this episode, I'm interviewing dr John Gales from York University, who has spent over a decade studying the historical origins of fire testing and the standard curve. John has found some missing links and narratives and has also done a pretty good job confronting the choices from the (far) past with modern consequences.

But that is not all. Within this "historical" theme, we venture far earlier, to the 18th Century and some first attempts to use fire protection materials and verify their properties with fire tests. Furthermore, we take a modern view on these historical origins, through modern fire tests John has performed on materials his team has recreated in their lab.

For the practical engineers - the episode ends up with a discussion on fire protection of historical buildings, where antique solutions meet modern codes and expectations. A very needed discussion in the fire community.

Connect with John Gales at: 
https://twitter.com/GalesFireSafety
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgales/

*** Linkedin discussion thread ***
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6823481111092486145

*** Useful links ***
The paper the episode is themed around: "The historical narrative of the standard temperature-time heating curve for structures" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10694-020-01040-7

Heritage fire protection materials and verification of their properties with modern methods: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352710219310551?via%3Dihub

A great supplementary material from 2012 - Gales J., Maluk C., Bisby L., Structural Fire Testing – Where are we, how did we get here, and where are we going?
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261992399_Structural_Fire_Testing_-_Where_are_we_how_did_we_get_here_and_where_are_we_going

Two part paper from 1978 by V. Babrauskas and R.B. Williamson:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01983053
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF01998390

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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.