Fire Science, Engineering And Education Episodes

The relation between ventilation conditions and fire severity is quite a fundamental one. You don't even have to be a fire safety engineer to realize that more air means a bigger fire. But how does air get into the compartmen...

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 w...

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 Univer...

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 engin...

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 shor...

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 - ...

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 compa...

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...

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...

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 str...

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 ...

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 wo...

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 bra...

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 Q...

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 desig...

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 ca...

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 epis...

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 Kuligow...

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 a...

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...

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 p...

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 s...

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,...

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 ...