Engineers Toolbox Episodes
065 - Understanding mesh sensitivity and model uncertainties with Jason Floyd
Aug. 31, 2022
Will a higher resolution mesh make my CFD more accurate? That is a harmless question, and most of us would tend toward 'I guess yeah'. But let us try and unpack this. Into atoms! What does higher resolution mean? How exactly…
062 - BIM (not only for fire) with Pete Thomson and Rino Lovreglio
Aug. 10, 2022
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. …
052 - More realism in evacuation modelling with Anne Templeton
May 25, 2022
You have seen these lovely evacuation simulations, the ones with a bunch of agents moving together or clumping at an exit. Ones that we use to determine ASET condition, and which are present in almost every large PBD project…
047 - Effective pressurization of compartments with Grzegorz Sypek
April 20, 2022
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 a…
038 - Fire resistance is not always enough for timber with Daniel Brandon
Feb. 15, 2022
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 enough. But why? You will learn that from …
037 - Human behavior misconceptions that lead to (mis)modelling with Enrico Ronchi
Feb. 9, 2022
If you were investigating phenomena and built your whole narrative around a flawed and debunked concept, would that get published? Would that get cited? Would that be recognized? Many of us would say an obvious *no*, but tha…
033 - Science, theatre or engineering? Polish take on hot smoke test with Piotr Smardz and Janusz Paliszek
Jan. 12, 2022
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 …
028 - Easy entry into the world of AI in fire with MZ Naser
Nov. 24, 2021
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…
027 - Travelling fires with Guillermo Rein
Nov. 17, 2021
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 insi…
023 - Risk assessment with Maximum Allowable Damage with Jaime Cadena Gomez and David Lange
Oct. 20, 2021
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…
021 - Resilient design for firefighter safety with Ali Ashrafi
Oct. 5, 2021
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 …
019 - Modelling human behaviour in wildfire evacuation with Erica Kuligowski
Sept. 21, 2021
There is plenty of fire engineers who think they are modelling human behaviour... Some claim they can do it... And there is very, very few who actually did and succeeded with it. One of them is today's guest, Dr Erica Kuligo…
016 - The future of evacuation modelling with Enrico Ronchi and Ruggiero Lovreglio
Sept. 1, 2021
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 rel…
013 - On the use and abuse of CFD in fire engineering with Wolfram Jahn
Aug. 11, 2021
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 …
011 - Why temperature is so easy to measure but so hard to interpret?
July 28, 2021
What is the single most measured thing in fire science? The answer is easy - temperature. We use it everywhere - from learning material properties in TGA's to expressing conditions in compartment fires. We use it at the same…