Gesamtlänge aller Episoden: 5 days 20 hours 15 minutes
Intumescent coatings are not magic. They are a product of amazing engineering, a theatre of thermophysical properties that create an insulative layer that sometimes is the only thing holding fire from destroying a structure. A chemical masterpiece in which the onset of swelling is chosen so that the paint layer is soft just when the chemical compound used to foam starts releasing gasses. Sharing many features with natural carbon-made materials, they char and oxidize...
Long before I started the podcast, my bread and butter was to find clever ways to remove smoke from shopping malls. Actually, I like to believe I was pretty good at the job, given the fact some of the biggest projects in Eastern Europe successfully made their way through our office. At some point (after reading Roger Harrisons PhD thesis) I figured out there is some science in the stuff we are doing in our engineering, and that day I turned into a scientist...
Many creators will not agree, but in some cases, copying is the highest form of admiration. And there are things in Fire Safety Engineering that are more than worthy of being copied. One of them is the famous International Masters in Fire Safety Engineering course, carried together by the Universities of Ghent, Edinburgh, Lund and a new member - Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. And from what I've just learned from one of the masterminds - Prof. Bart Merci and Prof...
When thinking about 'risk' do you view it as a tool? I usually thought about it as a concept or maybe as a measure of 'how safe my building is?', but I have not really appreciated how beneficial it might be when used in such a way. Once you take it in its basic form - presentation of probabilities and consequences of fires in your buildings, you may use it to find answers to questions, that are a struggle to answer in another way...
Today we talk fire resistance, but unlike you have ever heard. Join me and Dr Piotr Turkowski - two fire laboratory professionals in an honest discussion about their craft. The challenges in standardization and committee work, discoveries in laboratories that are very tough to implement in the test method design, and sometimes unscientific approaches which are necessary for a market consensus. All the challenges that make us view fire resistance in a different way than you may have...
Why so many researchers are spending their time tackling fire issues at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI)? What is so challenging about this? We always lived near nature, why today this emerges as one of the 'hottest' topics of fire science? As my today's guest Prof. Michael Gollner says - you need a very bad combination of weather and vegetation conditions to create a really bad fire...
What factors influence the walking speed of an occupant? Is it just their physiology and crowd density? It seems it is more complicated than that (as most things are in fire science...). Dr John Gales of York University takes me on a journey through their extremally interesting research on anthropomorphic data and movement speeds, which they have been extensively carrying through the last years...
We've felt a bit awkward about how FSE handles smoke control in corridors. If you look closely into common practices, they rarely do include impressive engineering - more often you see some 'tips and tricks' that make the CFD simulations work out and systems are accepted. Doors opening/closing in specific timeline points, heat source sizes or soot generation parameters.....
I wonder if we will be ever able to say: we know exactly how to build fire-safe buildings with mass timber. However that day may never come, each day of research brings us a little bit closer to achieving this goal. And some days - like the one in which Andy Buchanan and Birgit Östman published their open access handbook on fire-safe use timber, we definitely leap towards success!
In today's episode, I'm interviewing prof...
Will a higher resolution mesh make my CFD more accurate? That is a harmless question, and most of us would tend toward 'I guess yeah'. But let us try and unpack this. Into atoms! What does higher resolution mean? How exactly solver deals with increased spatial discretization and what are the exact consequences of that? What is a high resolution for a tiny orifice and what is a high resolution for a road tunnel? But it gets better.....