Fire Science Show

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...

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...

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,...

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 connec...

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 Dir...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 mode...