Structural Fire Engineering Episodes

I wonder if we will be ever able to say: we know exactly how to build fire-safe buildings with mass timber. However that day may never come, each day of research brings us a little bit closer to achieving this goal. And some...

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...

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...

It is the third time we talk about mass timber and fire in this show, and I hope every time the message gets even more refined. In this episode, it is clear - fire resistance is not always enough. But why? You will learn that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Did you know that the standard temperature-time curve, which is the underpinning of the fire resistance of assemblies, is over 100 years old? Once you know that, you cannot stop but think about how this affects modern constru...