033 - Science, theatre or engineering? Polish take on hot smoke test with Piotr Smardz and Janusz Paliszek

Hello and welcome to the Fire Science Show. Happy New Year, everybody. Glad to be here with you in the new season of this podcast. hope your winter holidays went well. Mine did, fueled with energy ideas and ready to kick some podcasts. So the topic of today's episode for me, myself is, a bomb or a fire at least. And that is the hot smoke testing method. if you follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn. And you sometimes see, I post pictures with us doing fires in buildings. And, sometimes I show these on conferences and usually there are two reactions to people outside of Poland seeing this either. It's like, wow, what's that? How do you make fires in buildings? What do we make them for? And people are just curious because they have never seen. Or the second group is people who say, oh my God, hold smoke testing. That's a ridiculous concept. That's stupid. That's nothing like a real fire Thats a theater. , that's a mockery of engineering. I rarely hear opinions like, wow, it's a great tool. It's so useful. I'm glad that we were doing that, but when I'm in Poland and discussing here internally. it's, it's completely different. Like everyone is happy with the method. Everyone is using that. it's so common. I would put split claim that every single large building in Poland undergoes through these tests. I think we figured it out in here, how to make the best use of that method, how to sacrifice some of the components that you think are necessary. Like the ability to determine. capacity of the ehxaust system is correct or not like you sacrifice this element and you gain so many options that allow you to test so many different things and smoke control, just being one tiny puzzle of the, building. So to discuss this today, I've invited two my Polish friends. Piotr Smardz and Janusz Paliszek from a Polish engineering company INBEPO. They are charted fire experts in here and they're running a successful engineering company, probably my biggest competitor in terms of hot smoke testing. So it's kind of funny. We get together to sit down and discuss this method, but it's quite funny that we share the views on the method. Actually, we didn't develop it a together. Each of us went through their own path, how with, with this, and we actually reached the same conclusions. And then, we agreed briefly much on how, this can be used. So yeah. Please join me in this discussion on hot smoke tests are actually not that bad thing and how they can be used to, to gunnery safety in buildings. Because after all in Poland, it works, we have countless investors who pay us money for a test that is not required by law. That is usually. Annoying because it points to errors that, creates additional complexities and, actions to be taken at the very end of your construction of your building. And yet they, they do ask for these tests and they're routinely performed because the gains from them are just so much bigger than the hassle. This creates on the construction work. Anyway, that's enough of an intro. That's let's go with. Hello guys, welcome to Fire Science Show after the short Christmas break. , welcome to the new year, and I'm happy to be here with you. And today with me, two of my good friends Piotr Smardz and Janusz Paliszek of INBEPO Polish fire expert company.

Hello,

hello to you and to others and happy new year.

happy new year. , so, we're here today to discuss an interesting aspect of fire engineering and to my best reflection. It's a very Polish thing actually in a way, and that is hot smoke tests and it's something that we hear love and the rest of the world hates in a way. And, for me, it was always surprising, that this method that does not have that much love outside of Poland as it has in here. But first I would love to ask you, , how it started for you guys. w when did you start doing hot smoke test and then what were your initial experiences in doing that?

When we first sort of became aware of hot smoke tests while still working in Ireland in the early two thousands, both Janusz and myself, we were actually working as fire safety consultants in Dublin, Ireland, and on one of the projects, actually on two projects, prison projects, interestingly that we were involved, such a hot smoke test were requested by the client and they were carried out. And this was really the first chance for us to become familiar with, the methodology, with the concept. It must be said that hot smoke test were not very common in Ireland at the time. And they are. In fact, not that common, still today, as you said yourself, in many countries outside Poland and maybe Australia, and a couple more hot smoke tests are not very common. And then shortly afterwards, we moved back to Poland we actually realized that there will be a market hot smoke tests. And we started purchasing the equipment. And actually because of the time, there was a lot of, progress in Poland in small control designed in general, we could see that and there will be a market for subsistence. We started doing them as did ITB around probably roughly the same time.

From my perspective, it was similiar I joined ITB in 2010 and my previous boss Grzegorz Sztarbala was already doing them , in Poland. So I've joined the team that was already performing these types of activities, but also, in relation to smoke control, you mentioned that the smoke control was booming in Poland at the time, and it was it's true that it was around the time when we've introduced performance based engineering in Poland for smoke control, which I would assume had an impact on new technologies being used, for also verification of the systems that. Now today I know that hot smoke test is not that much about smoke control or maybe not primarily about smoke controls. When did you realize that these two goes beyond the smoke control system capabilities? That it's actually could be something more than just testing.

Yes. I think it's fair to say that, when you just do, even if the first few tests may be in different buildings, we started with a shopping center, with a car park. You realize that a lot of phenomenon that you sort of read them out in the handbooks of maybe smoke control design that you can actually see them. I'm talking about things like, uh, like a spill plume, like distortion of a smoke layer by incoming air and so on and so forth. So I think probably for both of us, it's fair to say that quite early in doing the test, we realized that it's not only a tool to check something, but actually a very good tool to learn about things that, as you said yourself at the time, things like CFD simulations that were becoming more widely used in Poland. So it was really a, you know, the two methods were complimenting one another point.

And, in terms of how we are doing the hot smoke tests, I often, in the discussions, use the term, Polish methods. And I didn't coin that one. It was, some people in, Graz conference in Austria who started calling this particular way of, of doing the hot smoke tested as the Polish method, which made me very happy. And I've picked a, the term. So, , maybe you can bring them listeners, on what the Polish what's, whether they is like, what's the basics, how does it work?

Actually, what I can say myself, I will, the Polish method they would call it much more. Australian

Australian method?

was basically do the mythologies quite nicely. This. In Australia on standard 4391 from 1999. all the methodology is very nicely introduced in this standard. basically, we just adopted that method, I would say fully or nearly in all extent, what we do, we just burn in some traces, alcohol, which gives us a heat source. Although I have to admit that they are different types of the heat sources. They can be just gas burners or heaters, electrical heaters, or as I said, an alcohol. And also we use like, as a tracer. a white smoke, which is provided into the, smoke plume And, that's more or less how the methodology of the testing works. What we also do. We also record the, , entire tests, just videotaping it, just to have the evidence of the, outcome things and observation, because during the test, because usually the objects are quite large, it's not really possible to see every, uh, little happenings, taking place during the tests. We have to take measures. You read there is plenty of people doing so some people are just measuring the air flow velocity. Some people are just trying to take the notes about to the action we take place during the test, including how the fire grows. When we switch on the, , smoke generators. When we set up the fire, when the alarm starts, when the steering of the smoke control system starts and other systems like smoke detection or fire, the fire alarm system and so on and so forth. So in all together, this is quite complex things where we can just watch and witness and experience it the way which is close to the real fire. But it's not a real fire.

Yeah, I absolutely love the, that it took you 30 seconds to describe the smoke generation and the heat source. And then you went on and on about the things that happen during the test. And I find it is an amazing way to summarize what the hot smoke test is. It's not about releasing the smoke in the building. It's about what happens in the building when you do that. And I think this is something that. Makes the difference between the approach we are using it and how we are using and what for, we are using that in Poland compared to other countries in which they don't like it because it's theatrical, because it's, just an illustration of a fire someone is trying to prove that in a real fire, something will act in a certain way when we were not really reproducing a real fire or not, fire of a, of a full size.

One thing I wanted to add, I mean, you are very right this is not a real fire, but we still can have a relatively large, testifier in a building. And what the Australian standard AS4291 puts a really stress on is that you need to do this safely. So there is a number of actually of safeguards. The, the metal trays are actually now, in water bath uh, there is a number of safeguards. You need to ensure that they are in place in order to do this safely. And there is the entire methodology in the test, helping you to, select the right fire size test fire size. That will be large enough be as close to, the actual fire as can be. But at the same time, that will not damage your, installations that are probably already in the building that will not activate the sprinklers because quite often you do this in a sprinkler building. So while you are right, that this is, this is smaller. And of course the test is not about just producing the smoke. It is important to recognize that the standard really gives you a methodology, how to do this safely , and in a controlled and repeatable manner.

if I remember correctly, one day I was searching for the origins of the standard. And I have came upon a paper from some people from Melbourne fire brigade that was like 1995 or something. And they were doing this methylated spirits experiments , in a water stabilized, pool fires. And this gave the origin to all these traces and fire sizes and everything that's in the standards. So I'd actually started with some pretty neat, , fire science in there. In ITB, we're following that methodology or maybe we're doing it in a similar way as the Australian standard would describe it, or we use our own, fire sources. Like we've done the exercise myself and we've measured the heat release rates from our trays. We don't water stabilize them because we use mixtures of alcohols that we know how they burn. , we know how long they will burn what, temperatures we'll gonna get. So it, it was quite a bit of, , exercise from our site to, to engineer this, but it was necessary to simplify the test, you know, and cut off the, , additional, that make the test more complex and harder to set up. Because later in the talk, I guess I'll try to convince you that the, quick hot smoke test is better than the complex and the slow one. But before we go there, I wanted to comment , on the different methodologies used around the world, because it's obviously not the only way to smoke your buildings up. From very simple things like using pyrotechnics in your building, like smoke flares and firework type materials, which I highly don't recommend because they are dangerous in terms of toxicology and, the smoke made by them is very persistent through, something I really love the Austrian, tunnel hot smoke test methodology, where you literally put 20 liter, , gasoline, 40 liter diesel in the two square meter pan you set it on fire and it is a real fire. And that's that, that one is, is absolutely crazy. Up I have to very, complex tools used to generate smoke in buildings. I don't know if you've ever seen that, but there are people that I know in Spain to develop, the machine to generate smoke, which incorporates both the heater and the smoke generators in inside, and does actually quite, quite a crazy concept that you have it on one cart. And that's probably the pinnacle of how mobile the method can and can get so-so. There are , many ways of putting your smoke into the building For me, myself, important aspect is that we have a buoyant plume of smoke. So we see these layered behavior of smoke that is more or less representing the physics of a real fire. And the other thing is that. Activate many things at the same time, like we don't discuss this as a global test of building, not the local test of a single sensor. And for me, that's the groundbreaking thing about it. But the true question is, does it have to be a real fire to be useful in a building to be a valuable thing to do in your building? Does it have to be a real fire?

Well, you know, , I can say that the best option would be if the fire would be a real fire. Unfortunately we are not really able to, witness the fires and experience the fires the same way as the firefighters. That's the only people who have the real connection with. As we are fire safety engineers, we need to use tools. And for ourself, the hot smoke test is just a tool. It's tool, which replicates the possibility of the fire. So my answer is, we not really providing the conditions as actually the same as during a real fire situation. Mostly this is related to the thing which Peter already said before, which is related to the possible damage to the object. Obviously it's possible physically to create a large fire, but the question is, if we are going to have this large test fire under control. That's the first question. And I would guess not really. And the second question, which is just a consequence of the first answer is what's the damage are we going to make to the building itself? We have to always say that basically the time when we get into the object to provide the tests, it's under the latest stage of the construction, just right at the hand over not always the building is fully ready to be open, but at the same time, all the systems should be working correctly.

One thing I would add to that is that UK people sometimes say that, okay, this is not the real fire because you might design fire is five or 10 or whatever megawatt.

Yeah.

I don't know, maybe think that really misses the point on sort of two accounts. First of all, as Janusz said, it's just not practical to have the real fire in the building. And also, we sometimes miss the fact that we assume fires could be growing fires. Like very often this concept of t-squared fire , is adopted. We recognize the fact that fire is small at the beginning, and then it grows the heat output grows and so on. So we must realize that this fire size that typically can be used in a hot smoke test say may be between 300 kilowatt and maybe one megawatt, that is not really far off the fire size that you will on average have in the first few minutes. And the first few minutes is actually the time when people evacuate and at least in the Polish regulatory framework, that's the time that you, for example, For your, evacuation conditions. So I would actually argue that, although, okay, we will not even get close to the maximum heat output that we designed the system for. In fact, we will not be that far off and certainly what we are producing with this hot or say warm smoke is much closer to reality because it's a buoyant, , smoke layer compared to a situation where you just introduce what is called cold smoke test, where introduce smoke. That is just feeding the space with smoke but bears, no resemblance , to actual fire. So I think hot smoke test methodology is much, much closer a real fire, although it must be admitted that it's not the fire size we normally design

If I can just add something else, it's basically. Maybe we do not replicate the real fire, but at the same time, we can be close to the design fire, including the growing part, like having couple of cases with the fuel or heat sources we can switch on one by one, all the heat sources, just trying to replicate the fire growth to the size, which is obviously for the test itself. So we can observe, and we can, analyze the situation in a real building as during the design stage, when for example, somebody is doing CFD. So basically what is very important. This is quite a good CFD verification tool.

I liked how you framed it. Interesting part from the life safety perspective, which is the growing phase of the fire. It may be not such a bad representation. And you've also mentioned sprinklered buildings in which you would guess that at some point, the sprinkler gains the control over the fire size. So assume it may actually be quite close to that. Obviously we don't simulate cooling effects of the sprinklers unless you trigger them. We've actually did that twice and unfortunately, , out of, more than a thousand tests. So it's not a, not a horrible outcome statistics for you, but yeah twice we've witnessed a wet smoke test. I asked you the question, , about the realness of the fire, because, looking through the literature or even the reviewing papers recently, I see people trying to justify the design of smoke control system with a hot smoke test. People claim that, okay, this particular system has worked well with this particular size of a hot smoke test. So the design is valid. And, for me, I don't like this approach. Uh, I've also know about approaches where people try to measure like temperature profile along the height of the building, or try to do some very complex measurements of flows and other things and justify, okay. In my hot smoke test, I have achieved this height of smoke layer. So if a real fire had like 10 megawatts, the layer height would be at this size based on fundamental, like Froude number, uh, calculations or just, by an experience. For me, at the one hand, it may be where the hot smoke test is originated from, because if you go back to work of de Smedt and Morgan, they've used it in this way, but for me it kills the purpose. Like I am personally completely happy giving up the capability of verifying if smoke control capacity is good or not, because I've already done that with CFD or someone else has done that with CFD and focus on other things rather than make my hot smoke test extremely complex. And try to prove that, that this efficiency is good.

I must say that we have not come across such a demand say from our clients or maybe from the authority from the fire brigade witnessing the test, but we are aware of that discussion, as you said, especially in the UK and the paper Howard Morgan and, , Jean-Claude de Smedt published sort of suggesting this methodology. I must say that I would agree with what you just said. I mean, we must, and we are trying to explain this to people that the hot smoke test is not really a verification of the overall efficiency and the fact that the system is sufficiently sized. Okay. Because we knew that the capability of the system is sufficient because at the end of the day, we'll probably be an order of magnitude below what the design fire is. I mean, just to give you an idea, you would design this for maybe depending on the situation. Say between four let's say and 10 megawatt, roughly speaking. Okay. The test in a typical car park, especially with sprinklers, you will normally be limited to a maximum of maybe below 500, like one large tray would be 340 kilowats So that's 10 times less than the design fire. So we are not claiming that this is the real fire, but the fact that we introduced a large amount of smoke that this smoke may be can migrate to adjacent smoke zone. We will be able to, for example, if the system is incorrect program, we will be able to demonstrate that because maybe we will activate the smoke extract in adjacent zone where it was not intended to. So I think it's fair to say that we are not in any way, trying to prove that the system works. As you said, this is done typically by you either hand calculation or a CFD in case of a say car park it would more typically be a CFD model. But what also Janusz mentioned is that you can validate that model to some extent, obviously not comparing your design simulation with your hot smoke test, but if you, in the same computer model, if you introduce a smaller fire, which is representative of what you did in the hot smoke test, and you get similar results, they will be different from your original simulation. But if you compare them with the results of the hot smoke test, that will be a nice, validation of what you have done in the modeling. So that's the way we would look at it.

We believe that hot smoke test is a very nice verification tool for the analysis and design of the smoke control system. ways the hot smoke test takes priority in terms of the results, rather than. CFD analysis or the design itself, because it happens in the real building with, we would say real environmental conditions, not exactly with the size of the fire, of course, but it happens in the real life. So whatever happens in the real , life is more realistic that whatever happens in the virtual reality.

Well, in the sense that you're assuming to not include problems with programming of the system,

I think we have the biggest difference in actually in tunnels and in ITB we had tunnels just recently in Warsaw which was designed for a hundred megawatt fire and okay. We could go crazy with our hot smoke test because we've done like two megawatts in it. And it was, it was scary that the fire was like four meters tall and it was like, , yeah, it was a big fire. I wouldn't didn't do that in the car park. I would not, I would not recommend that in the car park. However, I know that in Singapore, they actually do that large fires in car parks and I admire them. I would love to be invited to one of them to witness that. However, in the tunnel we do two megawatts. You designed for a hundred megawatts and you usually focus on concepts like backlayering or just general, where the smoke will go in. And there is absolutely no way you can compare two megawatt, fire to a hundred megawatt fire that is completely different physics. And it's not only a negative physics and it's kind of funny, but sometimes with a bigger fire, the system would have a better performance because, , you would exhaust more volume of the air because your exhaust has constant mass exhausts rate. The smoke cools down as it flows through the channel. So sometimes there's the systems in tunnels at the inlets, they have higher capacity at high temperature than they have in low temperature. The chimney effect will be completely different. , The way how smoke will, , block the airflow because in tunnels, the air coming from both sides of the tunnel is the most difficult thing to manage. And the huge fire is a block for that air. So it makes controlling that easier. Like it's completely different physics than you would have in a small hot smoke test. And yet, you, you can test a lot of things, but you cannot really prove the physics is correct. And I assume it would be same in shopping malls where you have spill plumes and the physics will be completely different in the large fire, like in large open plan buildings where you have very tall, buoyant plumes and the physics will be different. So, , catching the real behavior of the fire , is not always possible, but also not always necessary. So coming back to the bullseye, you've hit with the programming. When I was doing a hot smoke test, when I was learning hot smoke tests, I have, learned the immense amount of ways. You can screw up a system in the building. You know, you can make so many things go wrong in a ways a normal fire engineer. would never expect, we assume that things work in the building. When I design smoke control system, I assume that the smoke detection system will be working and we'll pick up the fire. Yeah. If I, uh, have compartmentation in my car park, I assume that, the gate closing them when close. Right. And these are the things I don't even think about. I just assume they work. And yet in the buildings, they often don't like, I don't know. Do you guys make a statistic of how many times something went wrong in the hot smoke test? We used to do that in ITB and we were after a few hundred tests. We were like at 80% non-working, which was a horrible statistic. And we've stopped. I don't know. What's your experience with automation in the building failing in a way.

Well, we do not sort of keep track on it and we do not calculate and statistics, but we would agree, especially, I mean, we see this often in practical terms on building sites that are just about to become operational buildings, that there is this push from the contractor to get you on board as early as possible. But you end up going to a building, which is really not ready for this test to be quite honest. So it very often happens in our case that we do this sort of preliminary. It turns out that somethings I've done incorrectly that maybe this or about this program incorrect you're installed incorrectly and we ended up coming there again and doing the actual test , that ends up in the documentation as the official test that was carried out. but yes, I mean, very often, it's funny because theoretic, you go to a building that the systems were already checked. Someone may went anemometer. Someone wants supposed to anyway you to go and check the air flow through the extract. , grill is such and such that the incoming air is in fact in coming and so on and so forth. But you end up seeing in the test that there is maybe no air flow or worse steel. Someone measured that there is an air flow, but just in this particular fire scenario, it should be the other way around. Because as you know, in reversible systems, very often in one's fire scenario, particular point will be an inlet for fresh air, but in other situation, in other fires scenario, that will be an extract point. So that is really what you can see quite clearly in the tests, Also why things like excessive velocity, for example, of replacement air inlet again, that is something that you see, quite often that is more, probably a design problem rather than installation problem, but that's something I think is one of the biggest points in the correct, placement and size and, operation of, replacement air inlets is probably a bigger problem that incorrect placement , of extraction points. I would argue.

Absolutely. Absolutely that. Coming back to the automation, people, thats my opinion. People don't really appreciate the complexity of fire systems in large buildings. If you have an airport or a shopping mall, like a really large complex, multi-functional building the smoke automation systems inside crazy complex. We are talking about thousands of sensors. Each of them has an address. Each of them is designed to a certain zone in the building. Each of them has to be working. It has to not be in a failure mode. And it has to actually, be giving the correct alarm when it's triggered. You have countless, countless dampers on your ducts, which have to close or open accordingly in every scenario. And. In many scenarios, it will be completely different operation like you mentioned one, one scenario, you're exhausting air through a duct, another scenario you're pushing the air to the duct inone scenario you want this damper closed in other, you want this damper open and you have hundreds of dampers to program in your building. And it takes a single human error. You know, that, , this inlet was supposed to be close, but it's open. And suddenly the system behaves completely different in a fire in the hot smoke test that's then you would expect it to be, , the same thing goes with, the direction of the, fans. And especially in terms of jet fans, I mean, the listeners, it may sound hilarious to you that someone can program a fan incorrectly that goes to the wrong way. But trust me this happens more often than you would think. And. In, in hot smoke test, it takes one hot smoke test to figure it out, the direction of all the fans and their combined effort in, in a car park. So it really makes like checking these errors very easy. Whereas if you wanted to do it hand by hand device by device it's usually very labor consuming and Piotr you've mentioned , the air, inlet air, this, I would like, like you said, it's more design thing. I would put it into physics, not automation, because usually that areas let's say there is coming through where we've expected it to be coming from. However, commonly the velocity of the air is much higher than would be. And I didn't know why it is designed like that. I don't think there is a good unified guideline of what the velocity would be, or maybe the guidance exists. And they say it's one meter per second, which no one likes because it leads to a huge, huge openings in your walls. But truly that is something that you can observe a lot in hot smoke test. Whenever you have an inlet with like 3, 4, 5 meters per second, airflow velocity, and you place your hot smoke test anywhere near that, you see extreme mixing of smoke, which should have been buoyant and should flow up into the ceiling, but it's not flowing up because it's being captured by the inflowing air. And then suddenly your whole room is in smoke. , we've observed that in the so many buildings and in so many buildings, it was the, the main issue with the systems. And in fact, the designer I'm not even sure if it was design error, like probably okay. If you done a CFD better, maybe if you were more conservative with the assumptions, you would, do it better.

that's something we're dealing with Janusz, really a lot. you just realized doing hot smoke test, how profound effect on the smoke plume, the incoming air can have. And if you, it's not only that you should have sufficient size of the, of the inlet so that the velocity is relatively low. And in Poland, that is, there is a lot of confusion about, you know, what is the right value. Some people claim that five meters per second, this is great because that figure, as you know, is in the UK, design guideline documents and so on, but that's really just referring to velocity that is not obstructing people in crossing, , maybe a doorway or a gate. If you introduce air at five meters per second, close to the fire or close to the small plume, you will completely distorted. And in fact, I think it's fair to say that we have seen buildings where the situation in terms of smoke logging was better before starting the smoke ventilation system then after, so you can really distort and you can really completely damaged this flow of smoke under the ceiling in the spill plume in the axisymmetric plume if you have excessive air.

Yeah, it's in the CFD. You may not appreciate that, that much, because as I mentioned before, you have high, , heat release rate of your smoke plume so maybe the buoyancy is larger. Maybe it's a little tougher to distort the plume. And, it's also not that dramatic as when you are in the compartment, that's filling with smoke and it's obvious it's wrong. It really strikes you when you see that in a hot smoke test. And it's one of the things that we find most commonly during the, the hot smoke test. The other thing that we find very common. And for me, this is probably the most horrifying in fact, aspect of fire automation in buildings is like, there is this assumption that there will be one fire in the building at a time, like that's the golden rule. We designed for a single threat in the building at the time. So if my fire is detected in a fire compartment that I'm in, or let's say a zone of the building that I'm in, and then the smoke migrates outside of the zone, then the system should ignore that new information and should just keep removing the smoke from where it has started. And then in many buildings, I don't know the reason why, but we had situations in which the. Secondary detection in another compartment has caused stop of the systems in the one we were burning in and started the systems in the neighboring compartment. And then the fire moved to another one, the smoke move to another one. And the same thing happened again and again. So the system was operating in a remote area of the building when they should have been operating in the area where we were doing the hot smoke test and why this is so dramatic, because this is actually a fault that could lead to a loss of life. You stopped protecting the area where you have the fire and you start the systems in a different area and you actually create additional threat in the area where you were before, because suddenly, maybe you will start putting air inside that area because in the other scenario would access it as an inlet. And I would think it's in a very exotic. Things to happen, but no, actually I've seen it on multiple buildings, like more than a dozen. And some of them were like really, important buildings or critical buildings you may say. So you would assume no one would have done that mistake. And I don't know where the mistake came from was the automation people. I don't think it was the designer's mistake. I think it was the mistake in how the system was executed in the building. But this is something that you would have never, ever captured. If you are going a smoke sensor after a smoke sensor with a little, stick with a smoke can in your hands, like triggering a sensor after a sensor, one by one, you would never capture that. You need to fill the building with smoke to observe such effects and for me, this was the. Most horrifying experience I've had during hot smoke tests like this really good. If this happened in real fire, it could take lives. Did you guys come against such a big mistakes in the system automation that, , that were critical for the building during the hot smoke test?

Yes, of course. I have to. I agree with you. I also disagree with one thing. You've heard that you don't really understand how it happens. We understood. Basically talking to the people who were responsible for putting the fire matrix into working stage. For them is very easy. When they look out the fire Metrix, they matrix if the detection is in this area, this happens if the detection is in the other area, another scenario happens. So what happens is basically they do not understand the simple principle, which you said very early before that we assume that there is only one fire location. We know this as the fire safety engineers, but it appears that due to the lack of sharing that knowledge in much more wide area, the people, for example, responsible for the fire matrix and fire control, they do not really know that basic. What happens is basically the situation when the fire. Or a small control zone starts one after the other and after the other someone and so forth, we had this experience ourselves. Once we were doing the first , hot smoke test in one of the shopping centers, quite large, which was incorporating two mechanical smoke control zones, both being designed for 400,000 cubic meters per hour. Due to the smoke migration from one zone to the other, this smoke extraction started in the adjacent a smoke control zone doubling up to 800,000 cubic meters per hour. extract volume. What, what does it mean? You have exactly the same inlets, which you were talking about that usually are, there are more now, if you multiply those already crazy velocities, but twice you get even more difficult conditions inside what happens was we had basically a fog, a foggy place, although the extraction volume was huge, but it couldn't work sufficient. I also would like to talk about this, what you said before, in terms of the hot smoke test fire size, basically, there is a plenty of spaces, which you can prove that the smoke control system is designed for some minimum size of the fire. If the fire is smaller than some amount of the energy, which is provided to the volume, this, the smoke control system doesn't work. And how, how can you observe this as a foggy space and sometimes even the mechanical ventilation system doesn't help . So I would say that, yes, we went across it. We know the answer. There is no full cooperation between all the design members, including the MNE people. who usually incorporates guys responsible for providing the fire matrix but I would say the guys being on the contractor size, they usually have no connection with fire safety engineers.

You've mentioned education and that they don't know that. And actually that's a funny consequence of hot smoke test. This errors are so striking, so obvious during your hot smoke tests, you cannot. Pretend it didn't happen. Like you have your whole building in smoke and you cannot find your way out and you realize that something is not working. So the more hot smoke test you do, the more contractors' witnessed this state of mind, the better the overall engineering is in the country because they do less and less of these errors. However, it's a, it's still can be a considerable amount. So for the last 20 minutes, we've been talking about all the things that go wrong with the automations, all the, um small, Issues that happened with the building that actually made the systems not work correctly, all the errors. Now one could argue that you can find these errors without the hot smoke tests, because I guess you can, you can go on and measure every point with any in every scenario, but it would be just so much more labor intense than just doing a hot smoke test. Then for me, that the hospital test is really a valuable hot smoke and the second thing is the hot smoke test does not lie. You cannot convince smoke to not stagnate somewhere or to not flow in place. It shouldn't where the physics make it flow there. And it's also very obvious to point it to other people that look, this is an error in your system. You have to fix it because there is no way they can pretend they do not see it. So I see an immense value in here and I would like to make a cause. Because of all of these issues that happen in the building because of all these automation errors, because all of these simple problems like with inlet air or air balance or pressure that you find in your buildings quick and robust, hot smoke test method is extremely valuable to the building. And this is exactly why our methodology has evolved from the overly complex setup of Howard Morgan from this, , measurements of temperatures, planes, very complex setups that take you one day to set up. Then one day of an experiment one day to take off into a method that takes 15 minutes to set up, let's say an hour to perform the test. And then you move on. You can do five tests a day per building, and suddenly you become very efficient in testing buildings, part by part so in the end you can actually test it fully. So it's not just a sample that we've done one test in the basement, one test in an office, but you can truly like test the whole building with this. And from my experience, this is where the benefits of this method come into play, that you suddenly have a tool to verify. If the building has reached the, the zero level of safety that was designed with the line where the, which you design a drawn by designing all the systems. Does the building has this minimum level. And for me, this is so, so much more powerful than just theatrical, representation of a smoke in the building, or trying to convince someone that exhaust rate is correct. , for, for me, that is the hot smoke testing. I hope you guys agree with that.

Yes. Although I would, yeah. That I think at least in the Polish legal framework, I mean that sort of laborious and systematic, checking of the system is still needs to be done. It's just part of the commissioning process, but the hot is like a second layer of verification is like a, another song, suppose something extra that you can do to make sure that in fact, that all works together because as we said, certain things like for example, migration of smoke, which we realy see a lot be it through a leaky, a curtain or a smoke, everything, which is not deep enough, or even through lift shafts for providers, various ways. Some people do not even realize that they exist. We see it a lot. And then this is this added value of a hot smoke test. So that's something we see out, but I would still encourage people on construction sites to do the checking before we come and test because that, that needs to be done.

I will just at one, one thing, it's basically the best educational tool. Everyone who was tested, I would say he's designed was checked by hot smoke test, , will ignore the power of this tool to be verified and will come to the next design more carefully.

absolutely

The same way as we can test someone, we can be tested by someone and being conscious about this fact just brings the design to a higher, safer level, including for example, not ignoring the power of the inflowing air from the inlets because they can just ruin totally the entire system.

You will completely correct, with that, sometimes enough to tell a designer dude this will be tested with the hot smoke test and it will, it will fail. It will have smoke everywhere and this will not be commissioned. So you better, do it correctly. . Piotr Smardz: Obviously the test to educate anyone. But I think it's this sort of extra benefit that you get. I mean, we have seen it with our team, with people working with us here in the company, but also, you know, by the reaction of people, the designers who can witness the tests, the fire brigade people, because okay, many people in the fire brigade, especially working in prevention, let's face it. Then they not necessarily get to see a fire up close or maybe in a situation, which would allow them to appreciate the nuances of the smoke control design. So I think it's another benefit not on you test the system, but many people involved in the process actually get to learn something. And I think that's something that's not the intent. The aim of the test, but it's another element of it. And now, as a final thing, we've mentioned so many things that go wrong in a building that can go wrong in a building, especially in the automation. Let's put ourselves in the, in the shoes of an investor, you hired these people to do a hot smoke test in your building, and they show you like five days before the building was supposed to be open that it's not working. To what extent the things in the building are fixable. Like to what extent. After a hot smoke test, how quickly you can incorporate fixes to solve the most common issues you find in the building. Obviously, if with the hot smoke test, you find that there is no smoke exhaust when it should be, you cannot fix that. But when there are the errors are inside the matrix or the automation or the computer side of the system, they are fixable. What's your opinion on that? To what extent the building can be fixed after out smoke test

Well, it really depends on the situation. As you said yourself, the programming errors are the easiest and weakest , to fix, and they are, they're the errors that, that we frequently see. But it's fair to say that depending on the situation and sometimes also on the, on whether or not the designer had this foresight to, to actually try and maybe for example, design with a little bit extra capacity of smoke fans or a little bit more, replacement air inlets, then, then theoretically required.. If this is the case. If the designer has this, instinct or experience to actually maybe sometimes oversize the system a little bit, then you actually have , some ways of fixing some problems. Like for example, what we have seen a lot is that, sometimes the overall, way in which a smoke control or a smoke extract system works depends highly on the architecture. And sometimes by adding, something like. barrier in a certain place, or sometimes even putting a piece of a wall, maybe a few meters long in the right place can actually hugely improve the situation in terms of smoke logging. So these are things that fairly often can be relatively cheaply and easily done. Obviously you cannot very often, you cannot add a completely new inlet, but if, for example, your inlets are just made in the form of, something like external gates, then by opening more gates, you can probably improve the situation. Sometimes it's actually the other way around that you may have an inlet in an incorrect position. And then if you have, again, as I said, this extra area or extra capacity of replacement air inlet, then you can probably, either cover it or remove it. This can also allow you to influence the way in which the system, works. Also, what we have found is that sometimes the system is started from the very beginning, with the full capacity, where in fact, at the early stages of the fire, it's more appropriate to start maybe just with 50% capacity. So if you are designed to incorporate several smoke fans you can start the sequence. Sometimes you have frequency inverter that you can use to increase the capacity of smoke extract. So there are, if you are lucky, there are ways that you can, , fix a system which is not working exactly as it should, but course it's much easier fix the problems at design stage and better to do the design at the design stage that you find that to find out in a hot smoke and the five days before commissioning of the building, That's obvious

as I've mentioned before, we found the errors or problems, issues in at least 80% of the buildings we have tested. And I guess we've done more than 120 buildings by now at ITB. And I recall only one building. In which the issue was, critical design flow. and they had to actually build an additional shaft to provide, inlets air but that was the, in my whole career, that was the only building, which could not be fixed to a simple means. Like you said, adding a smoke barrier, adding a wall, removing curtain wall, opening or closing an inlet or outlet. Also things like merging smoke zone sometimes work, but sometimes you have a huge smoke control zone and you have to split it into two separate zones. Uh, sometimes you have multiple sources of air that you can choose from. And maybe the inlet that you thought will be most efficient is not the one that you should use. Maybe you should use adjacent one. Yes. It truly is remarkable how much you can change in the building that's already been built and, having this tool at your hands, like you are there with the smoke machine, you can do the change and test it and check if it works or not. And, for me, outside of that one case, we always found a way out. Like it was never a case that the building could not have been opened or would have been severely delayed because the hot smoke tests were done in it. And in every single case, the building was safer after that. It's like, we've never made the building less safe with hot smoke tests. They have always made the building safer. And for me, Outside of everything. This is biggest added value of this method. It adds safety to the building. And I really appreciate us finding that way of doing these tests and being able to actually deliver the safety to the buildings.

We can all agree.

Ah,

Yes. As you Janusz said, we can only, you agree with that. as you said, after most of these tests, essentially the modifications or the improvements in the programming, sometimes it's even simple things like changing orientation slightly you have jet funds, things like that. That really can be done in a matter of maybe a couple of weeks at the construction site, but they do improve the way in which the system works. So, yeah, I think we, we, we both agree with Janusz that. What you said is very true.

And it makes me very happy that we share this common opinion about the tool, because I think this is what the tool needs to be marketed as, the thing that adds safety to the buildings, not the theatrical representation , of smoke or a show for the firefighters. So they get lost and they, they approve the building. I hope the tool is not that I really hope it is something that adds value to the building. Okay, Piotr, Janusz. thank you so much for coming to the show. Why I really appreciate that. I hope that Polish methods will spread like a virus to the world and give safety to the buildings and their users. And maybe, maybe someone picks up. And if you were interested about this method, No, I'll drop the context to, to Piotr and Janusz in the show notes. So you can, , flood them with emails. They are very nice. Janusz replies immediately. So please, please do. So if you have how to implement that in your engineering Piotr, Janusz thank you so much for being here.

Thank you very much for invitation.

Thank you very much for inviting us and for the discussion since.

Yeah, it was great. Thank you guys. Bye. And that's it. I hope you've enjoyed that. let me summarize on what the Polish hot smoke method for me, The first thing is about creating a large size, threat in the building in the, in the form of, of buoyant, thermal plume, and a lot of smoke in it that spreads in the zone of the building that you are testing. And actually you can call it a global challenge for the building because there's, there's going to be a large part of the building being filled with smoke. And this global approach is so much better than individual testing. Like Piotr said in the interview, you have to do the individual testing of all of the components of the system, obviously, but. Sometimes they just act different when they are together in the system. To the extent sometimes delay. Caused by the amount of sensors in the system can just change the outcome completely compared to when you test the sensor after sensor, truly, we've seen that on some buildings that there were just too many sensors the network was overloaded and it took minutes to process the data. The second thing, it's not necessarily about the exhaust of the smoke control system or the performance of the smoke control system, but yet with this method, you can emphasize some failures of the smoke control system, like excessive, eh, inlet city, like, incorrect placement of smoke, curtains, leakages, , incorrect. Performance of dampers gates and so on. So this things you can hot smoke spot when doing hot smoke test, but you cannot really tell if the hot smoke test, yes , the system is, , appropriate for the building and the challenges, the fires in this building will bring, because we don't know The real fire. And the third thing is speed. When you cut down all the hassle with setting up thermo couple trees in the building, when you make the source very simple, something that you can move, something that takes approximately 15 to 20 minutes to set up, you suddenly gain ability. To run a lot of these tests and this changes the game completely because suddenly you're able to test the building as a whole. You can spend two or three days having 15, 20 tests in them and you build up this realistic image about the systems in. And that is just amazing. I would never trade this speed for ability to have 2 Megawatt fire in the building or ability to measure the smoke layer height with a non visual methods. Never it's just too powerful to be this quick. And, The experiments are very repeteable we've done that in laboratory. We've been to trace countless times. And, we, we get pretty much the same result in terms , of heat release rate or burning time So the repeatability of the, of the method is really good actually. And the final thing. You can fix almost everything that you witnessed on the building. Like literally buildings are fixable, smoke control systems are fixable. Smoke detection systems are fixable. You very, very rarely run into issues that would prevent opening of a building with a hot smoke test. And actually, if you do, that's probably some life-threatening issues that. It's maybe better that you captured that with the hot smoke test rather than open the building in just go on with your life. So there's really little risk that, , this will introduce delays in your building completion. And, as I said, in the final conclusion of the, interview, We never left the building, making it less safe than when we've arrived. It always made it safer. So I'm hoping that, uh, you're at least intrigued by this approach. Maybe you would like to try it if you want to know what equipment is used or how we're actually doing that, maybe want some photographs of the tests or something, please contact Janusz or Piotr the or you can email me. And when the share you with the details, because we are very happy to share this approach. And, uh, yeah, I guess that's, that's it for the episode. I hope you stick with me for the rest of the year. And episodes will be coming as usual on Wednesdays. We are going onwards so to the milestone of 25,000 listens of the podcast which I would love to achieve before one year anniversary that's in June. at this moment we just broke 15,000. So that's very good. And that makes me very happy. to have this big of an audience, , this wholesome audience that you are, and I hope you stick here with me. If you want to help me break the record, you can either listen to every episode three times, or you can invite some friends to listen to the podcast and, whichever you pick it. If you can share with someone please do so. And that's it for today. Thank you for being here with me and see you next Wednesday. Bye.