It does not matter if you hate or love BIM, does not matter if you use it daily or have no idea what it is... Building Information Modelling will be an important part of our engineering future and we better get used to it. I...
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...
Pressurization is a common strategy for protecting spaces against the infiltration of smoke. However, the solution has a kind-of bad press as "not-working" or "incapable to meet its design goals". We know, that the systems ar...
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...
What does the future hold? Probably no one knows. But what happens in near future with some of the most popular tools used by the FSE community? That is a great question to a tool developer - Bryan Klein of Thunderhead Engine...
Have you ever heard about the hot smoke testing approach? If you had, there is a great chance you have not heard anything positive about it... From our experience, this method is often downplayed as useless, unrealistic and i...
If you ever had anything to do with Fire Safety Engineering, you have most likely touched the visibility in smoke. What's an easier way to explain how bad the conditions are inside of a building than saying how much smoke was...
Have you ever been fascinated by the capabilities of AI? Did you wonder how the heck can an algorithm beat humans in repetitive tasks? Or make multi-level correlations that we would never be able to figure out? I was as well....
If you have ever learned about the compartment fire dynamics framework, have tried zone modelling or any kind of fire modelling, you have probably noticed that as the compartments get bigger, the less uniform conditions insid...
Risk as a concept is well established in modern Performance-Based Design in Fire Safety Engineering. However, it comes in many flavours - from a simple calculation of consequences vs probability, through indexing methods and ...
It is hard for us, fire safety engineers, to talk to firefighters on how to do their job... Probably we even shouldn't, as we have no idea how it is to truly go there into the heat and battle fire to save lives. But it does n...
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...
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...
Evacuation modelling is paramount in accounting for the human aspect in our fire modelling. But how is it developing? Where are we with our tools, and where are we heading with them? What are the most profound challenges rela...
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...
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...
Zone modelling is a technique introduced in 1970's and 80's that has changed fire science. In my personal opinion, along with oxygen calorimetry and the development of FDS it may have been the most impactful tool of fire scie...
Everyone is talking about AI, but how can we really use it in fire safety engineering and firefighting? Prof Xinyan Huang of HK PolyU will explain his research in this field, and we can consider it as a time travel to the fut...
Dr Matthew Bonner of the Imperial College London is one of the leading scientists touching on the subject of the fire safety of facades. His flavour is tackling the complexity through big data analyses and developing new ways...
How do you know if a building is safe in fire or not? Usually through performing ASET-RSET analyses, in which you determine how and when the tenability criteria in the building are breached. This is what I discuss with dr Gab...