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Hello and welcome to the Fire Science Show, episode 201.
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Let's start the third hundredth of the episodes with a good one.
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So I'm actually going to violate my promise to you.
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I've promised you that I'm going to deliver the prime fire science and engineering.
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But today actually I'm going to bring a little bit of science fiction into the podcast, because my attention was brought into a science fiction book, a novel, into the podcast.
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Because my attention was brought into a science fiction book, a novel written by Professor Joaquim Casal, and the novel is called the Last Fire, and it's actually a novel book but settled up in a fire safety engineering world kind of.
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And I had to call Joaquim and interview him about his story as a fire researcher, as a professor.
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So he's a professor at Universitat Politécnica Catalunya, he's Catalan and he's one of the founders of the fire group at UPC.
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In his free time his passion is writing novels and he just combined those two passions together and wrote a novel book in which the characters are fire researchers, in which the setting of the novel largely is related to fire safety engineering, world, fire research.
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And it was very interesting for me to discover this novel and read through it.
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So in this podcast episode we will talk about the novel, but actually not that much.
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We spent a lot of time in the interview talking about his background in industrial fires because he has an interesting view on fire.
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He's seen a lot of fires.
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He specializes in high-risk events in industrial facilities, so in this episode I guess we have never talked really about industrial fire hazards in the podcast yet, so having him in the podcast was a great chance to cover those.
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So in this podcast, a lot of fire science about industrial fires and also enjoyable novel in the background.
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I hope you will enjoy this twist of the fire science show.
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So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
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Welcome to the Firesize Show.
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My name is Wojciech Wigrzyński and I will be your host.
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The FireSense Show is into its third year of continued support from its sponsor, ofar Consultants, who are an independent, multi-award-winning fire engineering consultancy with a reputation for delivering innovative, safety-driven solutions.
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Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business by two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, with offices across the country in eight locations, from Edinburgh to Bath, and plans for future expansions.
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If you're keen to find out more or join OFR Consultants during this exciting period of growth, visit their website at ofrconsultantscom.
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And now back to the episode.
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Hello, everybody, I'm joined today by joachim kazal.
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Hello, joachim, nice, nice to see you.
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Hello, boy, chef.
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And joachim is an author of a novel, a fiction book, science fiction book, we could even say that is set in the realm of fire safety engineering.
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First time I've read a book in the universe of fire safety engineering, to be honest, and I felt very happy reading it because it's so well captured my life, in a way, as a fire safety engineer, fire safety scientist.
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Jacquem, first question I have to ask you so it's not your first novel.
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Uh, I assume this is, this must be some hobby of yours, but tell me the story.
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Like, how did you come up with a book that is so strongly connected with fire safety engineering?
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Well, look, I arrived at this point because essentially two facts.
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The first one is that I like writing and, yes, I have probably something about fiction and science fiction before.
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And the second reason is the fact that I have been, during the last, approximately large fires, full fires of different diameters, up to six meters in diameter of diesel oil and petrol jet fires, and so on, and so at a certain moment, I started to think about the possibility of writing something about fire, because I have seen that fire is a complex phenomenon.
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In fire, you can see, sometimes, strange things, strange things that have really a scientific explanation, but also could be seen and interpreted in a way of fiction or science fiction, and this is essentially why, finally, I decided to write this novel.
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As a fire engineer, I often come to an observation that fires are very non-intuitive.
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It's very difficult to have this intuitive understanding of the nature of fires.
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You think you understand them all and then you see a fire you have never seen and it completely escapes your imagination.
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Uh, is this also something you've observed in your career?
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yes, yes, well, because, uh, look, most people know some types of fire, which is, I don't know, the fire in in the kitchen that we use every day, and the fire may be a wood fire.
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But there are many more different types of fire which show a different behavior.
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For example, there are jet fires, when there is a fluid, a combustible fluid, which leaves from, for example, from the hole of a pressurized pipe or a tunnel.
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This fluid leaves at a very high velocity, often the sonic velocity, and then, if it gets ignited, we have a jet fire, which can be small, which can be large it depends and which has a certain behavior.
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Of course, the fire and the flames and the behavior can be different.
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If, instead of a jet fire, we have a pool fire, for example, we have a release of a liquid which is flammable, disavoid petrol maybe, and that is a pool and there is an ignition point, you have a pool fire.
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Okay, I work with pool fires and with the fires, and what have been these types of fire is very interesting because they show different behaviors.
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You can have as well another type of fire, which is the flash fire.
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Then we need a flammable cloud, so we have a gas or a vapor which is flammable, for example from petrol, and it is mixed with air and then at a certain moment the concentration is between the flammable limits.
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So that is an ignition point.
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We have a flash fire which lasts barely one second, maybe two seconds, and which is complete as different essentially from the pull fire, from the jet fires.
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Hardware is an interesting world with many possibilities.
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Okay, I will tell you a story of my biggest professional failure perhaps, where I really learned how surprising and non-intuitive fires can be.
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So we were doing this demonstration for Polish firefighters in a car park about smoke control system and we were using those small trays of 0.5 by 0.5 meters, so a quarter of a square meter, and we were filling them with propanol and we used four of them and like one meter above them we just built a small ceiling with gypsum plasterboard, just to, you know, imitate the plumes going on the sides of the car, so just to break the dynamics, you know, and on the sides of the car, so just to break the plume dynamics.
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And on the day before the demonstration the car park was sprinklered.
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So we've protected the immediately nearest sprinklers and we've protected one row of sprinklers around our fire, like further away.
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We've run the test.
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It acted like always, so we had it under control.
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We were very happy with the test.
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It acted like always, so we had it under control.
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We were very happy with the demonstration.
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Next day we did the demonstration live for the state fire brigade in Poland, including the chief commander of the Polish fire brigade.
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But we came to an idea.
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You know what?
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Perhaps let's just add one more tray, fifth tray, to the setup.
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Each tray was 150, 200 kilowatts of fire.
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Not very much, so we thought, ok, we will.
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Was 150, 200 kilowatts of fire, not very much, so we thought, okay, we will go from 800 kilowatts to a megawatt.
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That's not a big difference we put that fifth tray and when we started the fire it was completely different.
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Suddenly the radiation from the fire underneath this little ceiling created such a strong boiling effect on the propanol trays.
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It was not a plus 200 kilowatts, it was double the fire size we had previously.
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And what happened is the sprinklers in the third row which we have not protected.
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They went off directly over the head of the commander chief of polish fire brigade.
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I was absolutely sure my career is done at that moment and actually the firefighters were very happy because the first time they've seen you know how sprinklers operate in the car park in real fire.
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So they were very pleased with the demonstration.
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But I have really underestimated.
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How big is the difference between small and larger?
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They do not increase gradually in size.
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It was a completely different phenomenon.
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Yes, because when you have cool fires, after a certain time, at a certain moment, the liquid starts to boil and this implies that the aspect and the size and the turbo length of the flame changes completely.
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It's completely different.
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Yes, completely, it is another type of fire I'm bringing this up because, uh, this is the type of stories that you also, uh, share in the book, and this is the way how you describe fires.
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I'm uh giving you this uh description.
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I'm inspired by, by your work.
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I think it's beautiful to talk about fire in those simple manners.
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Perhaps let's let's tell a little bit more about the book.
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Maybe you, as an author, would like to introduce the book to the reader.
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So if you could just say generally what it is about and what you would like the reader to find in it, and then perhaps I'll complement that with my healing.
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Yes, well, not the book.
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The book has essentially two parts.
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I will not explain much about the book.
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Yes, let's not spoil it.
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No.
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The first part occurs in Barcelona and it deals with the research on fire okay, research on certain types of fire.
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Then some strange things start to happen and due to these strange things and to the people involved, then there is a second part of the book which happens very fast from Barcelona, which happens in Iran.
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Okay, In.
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Iran in Barcelona.
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Which happens in Iran, in Iran.
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I have been several times in Iran as a visiting professor at the university there.
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Iran is a very beautiful country with, I must say, a very beautiful and kind and hospitable people, and in Iran there is a minoritarian religion which is also in India.
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There is a minoritary religion which is also in India, in which it is called the Zoroastrianism, in which fire plays an important role.
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Okay, fire is related to God and in this religion there are the temples of fire, which are temples in which there is a fire which is never extinguished, which is always burning.
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And well, the second part of the book occurs in a completely different situation and country and strange things happen related with fire, and I'm sorry, but I cannot tell you anymore.
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Okay, if you want to know these things, sorry, you should read the book.
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Yes, so I'll compliment that, explaining a little bit of the setting, because the setting is so fascinating to me.
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So when you talk about the part in Barcelonacelona, it actually happens, uh, in a fire laboratory.
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The main characters of the book are fire researchers working in the fire laboratories yes, I find that very interesting, and the plot uh in, in a way a criminal plot or just the interesting plot of the book revolves around a technical problem they are trying to solve using different types of fire research and then, as you mentioned, the plot changes to Iran, also introducing the reader to some interesting concepts coming from Zoroastrianism about how cultures celebrate fire, about how cultures celebrate fire, how people feel fire is not just a chemical or physical phenomenon, but also a mystical thing, also bringing this element of mysticism or science fiction perhaps even to the book.
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I like how you in the introduction, said that there are many aspects of fire that we can explain with physics, but yet they look mystical or they look mysterious to some others.
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So I think this interplay was something you could take in a very interesting direction in the book.
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Also, now that you mentioned about the temple that has a flame burning for centuries actually I've been in such a temple.
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In Japan.
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There is an island, miyajima.
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It's near Hiroshima, a very beautiful place.
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I highly highly recommend anyone who ever visits Japan to go to Hiroshima and then go to Miyajima, and on that island there is a mountain called Mount Misen, and on Mount Misen there is a temple in which there is a cauldron.
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Underneath it there's a fire and that fire is maintained for 1,000 years.
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It's ongoing burning and I think the flame that is burning in the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima there's a big flame in the middle of Peace Park in Hiroshima that was set up from that fire in Montmissen.
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So it's very interesting that the culture, you know, just, you know the fire is not the 1,000 years old because of the mass transfer phenomenon and everything.
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But it's very intriguing that the culture can do that.
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Fire has been always very interesting and useful, and also dangerous, maybe for people, for humanity, and probably this is why in Zoroastrianism, fire plays a quite important role.
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Look, sorvastrizo was created by Sorvasta about 3,000 years ago or 3,500 years ago.
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It is the oldest monotheistic religion and it is few years old because in it fire plays an important role.
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Exactly exactly.
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I've described to you my experience with fires also for another reason.
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Uh, in the book you do a lot of things very cleverly and, uh, I see them as a fire safety engineer.
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Usually if I read a book and there's an element of fire, it's good, good, good.
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And then something happens in a, in a, in a way that is completely unphysical for me as a fire scientist, and I'm disappointed.
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In your book, everything was spot on.
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And on top of everything being spot on, I also captured those little tiny details that made me a lot of joy.
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One of those details is your description.
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So the characters perform different fire tests.
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They use pool fire as the method of them to study the thing they want to study.
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They can do some pool fires in a warehouse in Barcelona, near the airport, small pool fires.
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Then they have to go to a different place to make a larger pool fire and then they move into a different place, a different location, far away from Barcelona, to make those very large pool fires.
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And there is also a person observing those fires, those very large fires, and that person is able to come close to the fire, look into the fire.
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They're not how to say it scared of the fire and the other characters in the book say oh, this is very odd, that a person who never seen fire acts like that in the front of a fire.
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It's a very interesting observation that must come from your life.
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So what made you do this spin?
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And how do you observe people in the laboratory professionals behaving in front of the fire?
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Is it really something you could observe in your lab that, oh, this person must know fire because they don't act normally in front of it?
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Yes, yes, this can be seen and I saw it and I observed it, not much in the laboratory, because in the laboratory we worked with relatively small fires, of course, but when we had large fires in the open in the country.
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If you are not used to see this type of fire, you get an impression, you know yes, use it to see this type of fire, you get an impression, you know yes.
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So people and I have seen, really, that people who don't know this and who are using it to see and to be near these large fires the first time they see them, they are affected and you observe that they are not quite, they don't feel to be much safe close to these large fires and these turboling flames you know I see that in the laboratory even myself you have to get familiar with the fire.
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We often joke that when we run a set of experiments we grow in our courage.
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So the first fire, oh my God, this is a huge fire.
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We need to take it down.
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After a few times we get used to this fire and perhaps we can let it go for a little longer, for a little larger, and eventually, at the end of the experimental series, we are very comfortable running an experiment.
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Yes, but you must be aware that the tire can be dangerous.
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Of course, this is not a recommendation for people to do fire experiments in their homes or garages.
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We're talking about fire laboratories that make a living out of testing things with fire.
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So the book is set in the fire safety engineering universe, as I said, but it's very strongly connected to industrial fire safety because that is where your background lies and my audience.
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Many of the fire safety engineers in this podcast are used to more compartment fire physics.
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You know compartments, car parks, tunnels.
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This is the stuff that is mostly discussed in the fire science show.
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So, even though we are discussing your novel, I would still like to talk with you about your knowledge and experience with industrial fires, because this is also highly important to the book.
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You mentioned the different types of fires jet fires, pool fires.
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There's also boiling liquid explosions, gas explosions, flash fires different types of fires that are very relevant to industrial setting.
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Perhaps let's spend a few minutes and discuss those fires one by one.
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So first, maybe, jet fires.
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If you could characterize a jet fire as a fire and also as an industrial hazard, what exactly is so hazardous or so dangerous about a jet fire?
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Yes, jet fires are hazardous.
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Jet fires are often relatively small.
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Okay, there can be large jet fires.
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Can you define small and large in your mind?
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A?
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small fire would be between one and four meters, for example.
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Okay.
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However, there have been jet fires of about 30 meters length.
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Okay, that's huge left.
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The problem with jet fires is that the jet, which is originated from a hole or from a flange, lives at a very high velocity, very turbulent, and this turbulence implies a very good mixing with air, and so this implies good combustion.
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Okay, when we have a jet fire, you can see that the combustion is good because there is not much black smoke, not at all well, and what does imply this good combustion?
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this good combustion implies very high temperature.
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So the problem with the jet fire, even if it is relatively small, is that if it impinges on a surface, on the surface of a tank or the surface of a pipe, in a very short time the temperature of this wall will increase, of this metallic usually metallic wall will increase, and if inside this tank or this pipe there is a certain pressure, it can fail.
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So we can have here the so-called domino effect.
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It means that the first small accident, a jet fire, will imply a larger accident, which is the release, a massive release, from the towel which has failed or the pie which has failed.
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So this is the problem essentially with jet fires.
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Even if they are smaller often than other types of fires, they can be very dangerous.
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I have three follow-up questions.
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One the hazard comes only from the impingement of the flame or also just the radiation from the jet fire?
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If the jet fire is relatively small, as often happens, the problem is essentially associated to the impingement.
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If that is not impingement, okay, in certain circumstances there could be a problem, but usually not.
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And the second question earlier in the interview you said that the velocity can be supersonic.
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No, not supersonic.
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In order to have supersonic you would need a special design of the exiting hole.
00:23:58.798 --> 00:24:12.345
No, no, sonic velocity can be reached relatively quickly if the pressure inside the pipe or inside the town is approximately twice the pressure outside.
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That would mean, if the pressure outside is one atmosphere, if you have inside the pressure of two atmospheres, you will have sonic velocity.
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The reason why I ask this question is of practical reasons, because I know many researchers try to study those and I know many researchers try to study those and I know many researchers try to model those jet fires, for example with FDS software, and it has limits of velocities that it can handle.
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So it must be very interesting to study those.
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But let's keep this away.
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My third question is how do you extinguish those fires actually?
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In our textbook, the extinguish a jet fire.
00:24:55.154 --> 00:25:08.252
The only solution is to close one veil, to close something, and if you do it like this, for example, if there's a problem, the jet fire is released from a pipe.
00:25:08.252 --> 00:25:14.444
If you close a veil or a safety veil, it will automatically close it.
00:25:14.444 --> 00:25:18.457
The fire will be extinguished in a very short time.
00:25:18.984 --> 00:25:20.491
Okay, let's move to pool fires.
00:25:20.491 --> 00:25:27.176
Pool fires are essential to the plot of the book because this is the method used by the scientists in your novel.
00:25:27.176 --> 00:25:32.076
So tell me about your experience with pool fire experiments.
00:25:32.506 --> 00:25:43.298
I worked a week with my team, we worked with pool fires of diesel oil or petrol, which are much more dangerous.
00:25:43.298 --> 00:25:51.140
Pool fires with diameter varied from half a meter up to six meters in diameter.
00:25:51.140 --> 00:25:53.958
So when we worked with the larger fires, five, four, five to six meters in diameter.
00:25:53.958 --> 00:26:11.413
So when we worked with the larger fires, five, four, five, six meters in diameter as we worked with diesel oil, no problem, because diesel oil is not easy to ignite, but we needed to put some petrol, a little bit of petrol, to start the fire.
00:26:11.413 --> 00:26:16.416
However, when we worked with petrol, it was dangerous.
00:26:16.416 --> 00:26:30.525
It was a dangerous situation because we needed some time to fill in a pool of five metres or six metres in diameter and during this time, as in petrol, there are very volatile substances.
00:26:30.525 --> 00:26:32.625
In petrol there are very volatile substances, components.
00:26:33.678 --> 00:26:39.368
Immediately, you are having a flammable cloud above the pool, you know.
00:26:39.368 --> 00:26:47.810
So you must be aware that when you will ignite it, you will have a flash fire originated by the combustion of this coal.
00:26:47.810 --> 00:26:50.011
So well, you have to take.
00:26:50.011 --> 00:26:53.510
The person who ignites must be very well protected, dressed as a firefighter.
00:26:53.510 --> 00:26:56.223
And, okay, you have to take the person who ignites must be very well protected, dressed as a firefighter.
00:26:56.223 --> 00:27:00.813
Okay, all the team when we work with these flash fires.
00:27:00.813 --> 00:27:03.919
All the team were dressed as firefighters.
00:27:03.919 --> 00:27:05.571
Okay, completely protected.
00:27:06.025 --> 00:27:07.887
We'll come back to flash fires to subject that material.
00:27:07.887 --> 00:27:26.659
For me that was, for example, an odd thing about the book, because I'm a fire researcher and I have my furnaces.
00:27:26.659 --> 00:27:29.593
So I would just put the material in an industrial furnace for fire resistance testing.
00:27:29.593 --> 00:27:30.095
That's the way we do it.
00:27:30.095 --> 00:27:32.642
Material in an industrial furnace for fire resistance testing, that's the way we do it.
00:27:32.642 --> 00:27:53.784
But now, knowing your background and your professional career, I completely understand why pull fires are of the choice, and of course it gives us a possibility to nicely explain the fire instead of just oh yes, we looked at the wall of the furnace for two hours, which is perhaps not as exciting, for two hours, which is perhaps not as exciting.
00:27:58.065 --> 00:28:09.733
Well, in fact, if you want to analyze the effects of a pool fire on a certain material, a certain isolating or protecting material, it's not necessary at all to work with fires, large fires, large pool fires of six meters in diameter.
00:28:09.733 --> 00:28:18.915
On the contrary, it's much, much practical to work with much smaller pull fires half a meter, one meter in diameter.
00:28:18.915 --> 00:28:22.114
It's not necessary to go to larger diameters.
00:28:22.114 --> 00:28:27.234
It would be more complicated, more expensive, and so on.
00:28:28.131 --> 00:28:38.378
In the book it's explained that they really wanted to put the material to the furthest because previously a company has suffered a loss because of the material they used.
00:28:38.378 --> 00:28:41.775
So the plot explains the reason to go that far.
00:28:41.775 --> 00:28:48.939
In the industrial setting the mine hazards from pool fires is it fire spilling over different facilities?
00:28:48.939 --> 00:28:56.111
I think they have the catch spaces where they catch the liquid, so I don't think spillage should be a big issue in a well-designed facility.
00:28:56.111 --> 00:29:00.384
I assume radiation in this scenario would be a big issue of the very large fire.
00:29:00.746 --> 00:29:16.733
Yes, okay, if you have a kind of pull fire, yes, certainly, the radiation can be strong and if the pull fire lasts a relatively long time, the radiation can originate a domino effect.
00:29:16.733 --> 00:29:30.535
However, of course, if there is direct contact of the flames of this pull fire on another equipment, then the disaster or the domino effect can arrive, can happen in a much shorter time, certainly.
00:29:31.926 --> 00:29:41.333
The pull fire may also occur inside a tank, even if the tank is undamaged, for example, if there was a floating roof and the Well yeah of course, yes, you can have.
00:29:41.805 --> 00:29:58.915
If you have a problem with the tank, for example a floating roof tank in which there is an explosion and the tank loses the roof then inside the tank, if you have certainly a combustible liquid, you can have a kind of fire, a town fire.
00:29:58.915 --> 00:30:13.924
A town fire is more or less like a pool fire which takes place at a certain height, maybe four metres of the soil, or more 10 metres, it depends of the soil, or more 10 meters, it depends.
00:30:13.924 --> 00:30:21.028
Yes, it is that a tank fire has originated flames and radiation, more or less similar, more or less to a pool fire.
00:30:21.631 --> 00:30:42.352
One thing that we were learning in Poland about those types of fires, and I'll tell you in a second why it's important for Polish people that if you have a layer of water on the bottom of the tank and the fire is occurring on a liquid that's lighter than water, the heat can move through the liquid, reach the water and immediately evaporate it.
00:30:42.664 --> 00:30:52.833
You have the so-called boil over, and this phenomenon, this boil over, has killed many firefighters, because this takes place.
00:30:52.833 --> 00:30:58.673
Let's suppose that we have a fire in a town, a town fire, which has a town which has most its roof.
00:30:58.673 --> 00:31:06.415
Okay, firefighters arrive and try to extinguish the fire, and maybe this can take a relatively long time.
00:31:06.415 --> 00:31:09.193
So firefighters are there, nothing happens.
