Latest Episode
276 - How smoke control fails (and how to find a fix)?
When your smoke control CFD run fails by one meter of visibility and the knee-jerk reaction is predictable: add capacity, add fans, add cost. Here I would propose to stop for a minute and take a bit different path - to treat failure as the most useful diagnostic signal in fire engineering, because the real question is not whether a tenability criterion is met, but why it is not met and what mechanism causes the breakdown.
We unpack the messy gap between analysis and reality. Simulations usually
Recent Episodes
Nov. 11, 2026
276 - How smoke control fails (and how to find a fix)?
When your smoke control CFD run fails by one meter of visibility and the knee-jerk reaction is predictable: add capacity, add fans, add cost. Here I would propose to stop for a minute and take a bit different path - to treat failure as the most useful diagnostic signal in fire engineering, because the real question is not whether a tenability criterion is met, but why it is not met and what mechanism causes the breakdown. We unpack the messy gap between analysis and reality. Simulations usually
Nov. 3, 2026
275 - Property Protection and the Role of Insurers with Gary Howe
Fire safety engineering based on our codes and legislations often stops at life safety and code compliance. However, in the world of insurers, there is much more beyond that - a critical question is “what happens to the business after the fire?” Today I sit down with Gary Howe, Senior Risk Engineer at Zurich Resilience Solutions (Zurich Insurance Group), to unpack how insurance risk engineering evaluates fire risk across property protection, environmental impact, reputational exposure, and the b
Oct. 28, 2026
274 - SPyro model for predicting fire growth with Jonathan Hodges and Jason Floyd
Modeling the consequences of a fire is what most of us do day to day. Modeling how a fire actually grows across real materials, under changing heat flux and ventilation, is the part we tend to avoid, hiding behind a prescribed design fire. That gap is exactly what we tackle with Jason Floyd and Jonathan Hodges from UL Research Institutes, the developers of S-PYRO, a new engineering pyrolysis model already included in Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). We walk through the origin story in railcar fir
Oct. 21, 2026
273 - ASET/RSET concept - flawed or great?
ASET/RSET is the fire safety engineering idea that sounds almost too clean to argue with: the building must give you more time to escape than you need to get out. But once you try to prove it in a real project, the simplicity could and and the hard questions start. Where does “time zero” actually begin: ignition, detection, or alarm? What does it mean for tenability to fail in a place where nobody is anymore? And are we designing safer buildings, or just winning a seconds-on-a-spreadsheet contes
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