Risk, Performance Based Engineering And Modelling Episodes

From the SFPE Performance Based Design Conference in Singapore, we sit down with Jonathan Hodges and Mark McKinnon (UL Research Institutes) and Christian Rippe (Jensen Hughes) moments after their case study presentation to break down a modern parking garage fire engineering workflow with a huge does of performance based and probabilistic approaches. We talk about what changes when today’s vehicle fleet makes multi-vehicle fire spread more plausible, and why picking a single car fire curve can q...

Being a part of broader civil engineering and built environment sciences, we have the unique opportunity to learn from other "sister" disciplines, rather than coming up with everything on our own. Especially, when those disciplines have 100+ years of experience in investigating stuff that has recently emerged as one of the leading challenges in our field. The other discipline is Earthquake Engineering. The interesting stuff - community resilience and managing safety across tens of thousands of...

A tight, historic cellar. Arched ceilings. Long corridors. Tiny shafts. We faced a design wall: to keep routes tenable, we needed twice the extraction that the building could carry. At that point, I've failed as an engineer - I've reached my limit and could not find a solution. Some time later, a solution appeared in my head from nowhere —what if the fan changed with the fire? Not in a crude on-off way, but by tracking temperature, exploiting density changes, and chasing constant mass flow inst...

Today we cover another branch of safety of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), that is explosion prevention in mitigation. I always thought you can either end with a fire or with an explosion, and boy I was wrong... but we will go back to this later. Now I bring on Dr. Lorenz Boeck (REMBE) and Nick Bartlett (Atar Fire) to unpack how gas released during thermal runaway turns a container into a deflagration hazard, and what it takes to design systems that actually manage the pressure, flame, an...

What can you learn after processing observations across 900 severe fires? A lot. Actually, I will send you to the paper straight away: Evaluating 900 Potentially Harming Fires in Germany: Is the Prescriptive Building Code Effective? German Fire Departments Assessed Fire Safety Measures in Buildings Through On-Site Inspections And now let's dissect this. We sit down with Björn Maiworm of the Munich Fire Department to unpack a decade of structured observations from more than 2,000 significant inc...

What do you expect from running a fire test? I would hope that it improves my state of knowledge. But do they do this? We often pursue them blindly, but it seems there is a way to do this in an informed way. In this episode we explore a rigorous, practical way to select and design experiments by asking a sharper question: which test delivers the most decision-changing information for the least cost, time, and impact. With Dr. Andrea Franchini of Ghent University, we unpack a Bayesian framework ...

It is a massive effort to rewrite a national fire safety code around measurable risk, explicit targets, and cost-effectiveness. But sometimes, there are great reasons to do so. In this episode, together with Gianluca De Sanctis and Sofia Kourgiantaki we take you inside Switzerland’s sweeping reform, where a new federal law sets a maximum individual risk for life safety, ties property protection to a clear marginal cost rule, and harmonises practice across cantons. Together, we trace how the fram...

Water might seem like the simplest part of firefighting – just point and spray, right? Well, as you can imagine, the reality is a bit more complex. In this conversation with veteran firefighter and CFBT instructor Szymon Kokot, we pull back the curtain on firefighting's most critical resource to reveal the intricate science and logistics behind effective fire suppression. Did you know a standard fire truck carries just 10 minutes' worth of water for a typical residential fire? Or that a water-f...

Today I'm taking you for a sightseeing trip to see what fire safety looks like beyond our usual office, residential buildings and car parks. Fire engineering takes on an entirely different dimension when applied to massive infrastructure projects where conventional building codes provide minimal guidance and engineers must forge their own path. Dr. Mukesh Tomar from Jacobs takes us deep into the world of "non-real estate fire engineering" – the complex realm of cable tunnels stretching dozen...

When wildfire threatens neighbourhoods with closely-spaced homes, what determines whether flames leap from one structure to the next? The FSRI research team - Rebekah Schrader, Joseph Willi, Daniel Gorham and Gavin Horn - joins us to unveil their experimental series that methodically dissects the pathways through which fire spreads between buildings. The team walks us through their massive outdoor experimental setup, where they created controlled compartment fires and measured their impact on a...

CFD is the most talked-over subject in the Fire Science Show. There are two reasons for that: one, it is interesting and relevant for so many of the Audience, and two, it's something I do for a living. There is also another reason: there are a lot of ideas and concepts of how CFD could be used "better", yet I struggle to see them make an impact in the world of practical engineering. I would love to see the CFD being used in fire as it is in aerospace or Formula1 industries, yet, there are some ...

Wind turbine fires - are they an issue, or are they not? In this episode, I am joined by Prof. Guillermo Rein of the Imperial College London, who raised this issue 10 years ago at the IAFSS conference, and I believe we still do not have a clear answer. In this episode, we discuss the fire safety of wind turbines using the layers of protection framework - from suppression, detection, and prevention to firefighting. We have discussed the challenges with evacuation and the subsequent fires trigger...

Imagine if we had a tool that we could use to design a design fire. Instead of simply assuming fire growth characteristics by slapping the alpha-t2 function, use a tool that could tell us which items in a compartment burn and what the characteristics of that fire are. I would say this dream is shared among many fire safety engineers - I think we can all agree that we could use such a tool. Today's guest, Dr Greg Baker, has shared this dream and built a tool like this within his PhD at the Unive...

Today we go deep into how statistical data about fires is gathered, processed, and used around the world, and what are the ideas on how to improve this in the future. My guests represent the EU FireStat Project - Dr Mohamad El Houssami from Effectis and Dr Martina Manes from the University of Liverpool. EU FireStat is a groundbreaking initiative that aims to fill data gaps and foster cross-European collaborations in the field of fire safety. The conversation takes a deep dive into the necessity...

Balancing the cost and the potential to change a system in the future is a difficult act. Discover a new perspective on this aspect of fire safety systems with our guest, Jaime Cadena Gomez. We discuss the significance of longevity and sturdiness in these systems, bringing examples of technologies that have not withstood the test of time such as PFAS firefighting foams, and technologies that will rapidly enter our buildings such as Li-Ion storage for energy backups. Jaime offers intriguing insig...

It is time for some engineering fundamentals in the show. This time in the fire fundamentals series we delve into the details of natural and powered smoke ventilators - what they are, how they work, how they are tested and what interesting mechanics impact their performance in fire. I hope this episode is valuable for all engineers who would love to know how the devices they place in their design are tested and qualified for use in fire safety. It should also be a great way for fire scientists ...

in Episode 39 I had the pleasure to interview Bryan Klein from Thunderhead Engineering on some views and predictions for the near future of fire modelling. Even though it was only 1,5 year ago, some major things have already happened (release of Ventus - CONTAM GUI by Thunderhead) or snuck on us unseen as the large language model revolution. In this episode we discuss mostly the things that have happened in recent months, and how they can change the potential for fire engineering. The list of t...

My knowledge about fire safety at sea was pretty limited, at best. I was planning this episode for a long time, and then the disastrous fire happened at a car carrier near the Netherlands coast. In light of these events, I've reached out to Bogdan Racięga of the Baltic Fire Laboratory, a Polish maritime fire safety expert to discuss this particular incident and to delve into the intricate aspects of fire safety regulations on marine vessels. Bogdan explains and highlights the critical role of t...

Ever wondered how scale modelling can provide invaluable insights into fire science? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Professor James Quintiere, as we delve into the fascinating world of scale modelling and its applications in both fire science and fluid mechanics research. You will discover how this powerful experimental technique has been used to develop correlations, understand complex phenomena, and even predict outcomes of full-scale experiments. Together with prof. Quintiere ...

This week we cover the fundamentals of smoke flow (proliferation!), entrainment and smoke plumes. All the basics that impact the spread of the smoke in our buildings. You will learn: the ideal gas assumption for a smoke mixture turbulent nature of fire-induced flows axisymmetric plume models and their origins spill plumes window and door plumes basics of smoke control If you would like to read up more, please resort to: Review of plume models Enclosure Fire Dynamics - Karlsson, Quntiere,...

It is the newest Internet craze. In my opinion, maybe even be the most disruptive tech since bitcoin or the Internet itself. And suddenly, we got a lot of very interesting conversations around, but I've lacked on oriented on the craft of Fire Protection Engineering. I'm obviously talking about generative AI and "chatbots". If you don't know this term, you should definitely read OFRs paper on that in recent SFPE Europe! Discussions on chatbots are in abundance, but people having first-hand expe...

It seems we will not have EU Fire Code for at least a few more decades... Why is that? Because the people in power found out that it is not the most efficient thing to do it right now. And they found it through the power of research carried out by the European Commissions Joint Research Centre. I have invited Dr Adamantia Athanasopoulou from JCR to talk about their most recent report on the state of fire engineering (or performance-based fire engineering) in Europe, and it turned out to be a dis...

If you want to design a suppression system for a certain application, you have a lot of technical solutions to choose from and most likely a handful of codes to follow. It seems pretty straightforward for most applications, right? Well, it certainly was not like this for my today's guest and his application. The guest is Ulf Lundström of the Swedish Road Administration and his application was for road tunnels. But it is not that he just needed a sprinkler for that - he had a very specific sectio...

There is no universal answer to the question of how law and testing regimes should be set up. Sometimes, we build up our law after a huge tragedy, making sure that the same cause will not be of harm in the future. Sometimes, we act proactively, trying to build robust solutions so that all foreseen threats are minimized... But it is never without a flaw. And even if the system is flawless, one can hardly expect today's solutions to answer the problems of the future world. But we need those laws, ...