Episodes

Dec. 24, 2025

Merry Christmas everyone!

I would like to take this opportunity to wish you Merry Christmas, a great time with your families, a bit of rest and time to reflect, and an awesome 2026 to come! If you are desperate for fire science on Christmas Eve, check...

Dec. 17, 2025

231 - BESS explosion prevention and mitigation with Lorenz Boeck and Nick Bartlett

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...

Dec. 9, 2025

230 - Wind driven conflagration experiments with Faraz Hedayati

A facility with 105 synchronized fans pushing hurricane-class wind across a full-size house while a live fire... This is not science fiction - this is a real research capacity that helps us re-shape our knowledge on the full ...

Dec. 3, 2025

229 - Learning from 900 fires with Björn Maiworm

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 Eff...

Nov. 26, 2025

228 - Quantifying the expected utility of fire tests with Andrea Franchini

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 w...

Nov. 19, 2025

227 - The differences between EV and ICEV fires in car parks

A viral clip of an EV igniting was what started my worries about safety in car parks I have been designing. Are we ready for fast growing fires? Since 2019 I've learned and studied a lot, I've relaxed on some aspects of it an...

Nov. 12, 2025

226 - New Swiss fire safety code with Gianluca De Sanctis and Sofia Kourgiantaki

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 Sanct...

Nov. 4, 2025

225 - Battery Energy Storage Systems with Noah Ryder

Demand for the energy storage is as high as ever, and is about to triple-quadruple. The development of technology is at unprecedented phase, and even within a single project you may face different cell, battery or container g...

Oct. 29, 2025

224 - Navigating the complexities to change our field - a roundtable with Steve McGuirk and Brian Meacham

This week, in the Fire Science Show, we host a roundtable discussion on complexities in fire safety science and engineering. Most safety failures don’t come from a single mistake—they emerge when people, technology, and insti...

Oct. 21, 2025

223 - Heat-induced delamination in CLT with Antonela Čolić

In this episode of the Fire Science Show we invite dr. Antonela Čolić from the OFR Consultants, to break down the performance of adhesives used in CLT in fire, what differences between the glues are observable at the microsca...

Oct. 15, 2025

222 - Integrating WUI risk management and fire safety engineering with Pascale Vacca

In this episode we try to demonstrate another step in integrating fire engineering into WUI risk management, and vice versa. These two areas together form some sort of fire engineering method, which I strongly believe will be...

Oct. 8, 2025

221 - Fire experiments at the ISS (SoFIE-MIST) with Michael Gollner

Fire doesn’t play by Earth’s rules once you leave gravity behind. In this deep dive with Professor Michael Gollner, we unpack what the recent experiments at the ISS called SoFIE-MIST taught us about solid fuel flammability in...

Oct. 1, 2025

220 - Test vs experiment with David Morrisset

In this episode we dive into the ap between standardized tests and experiments, trying to figure out (a) is there a difference and (b) if there is, could not understanding the difference quietly erode safety. With guest David...

Sept. 24, 2025

219 - Giving back with the SFPE Foundation - with Leslie Marshall

In this episode, we give focus to the SFPE Foundation – a catalyst transforming how fire engineering research is funded, conducted, and shared globally. In this conversation with Leslie Marshall, Interim Executive Director of...

Sept. 16, 2025

218 - Fire decay and cooling phases with Andrea Lucherini

What happens when the flames die down? It's a question rarely addressed in fire engineering, yet the decay and cooling phases of fires can be more dangerous than peak fire conditions. In this deep-dive conversation with Dr. Andrea Lucherini from Frisbee at ZAG in Slovenia, we uncover why these over…

Sept. 10, 2025

217 - Things that go wrong with the smoke control and how we fix them

In my personal view, an alarming truth about building fire safety lies in the gap between what's designed and what actually works in a building. After conducting 1000+ hot smoke tests in 200+ buildings, my experience is that most (maybe even 90%) of buildings had deficiencies in their smoke control…