Episodes

A battery fire on a train is not “just another small fire.” When a lithium-ion battery in an e-scooter or e-bike fails, the rail car can behave like a long pipe that moves smoke fast, limits escape options, and compresses decision-making into minutes. We sit down with Adam Barowy from UL Research Institutes FSRI to unpack new full-scale passenger rail car burn tests using real micro-mobility devices and realistic storage locations. We talk through what thermal runaway looks like before flames, w...

In this episode of fire fundamentals we sit down with Professor Simo Hostikka from Aalto University to cover radiation in fires, both from the angle of physical phenomena and ways to model it. In this episode we cover following topics: feel less mysterious, from blackbody basics and role of radiation actually does inside the CFD N-S equation. Spectrum and emissivity to real engineering outcomes like heat flux, tenability Radiation’s two roles in fire CFD: target heat flux and the gas energy sour...

While we can get pretty far with a very simple approximation of what a fire is in our fire cfd, at some point our simplications are not enough. And there is a plenty of features and phenomena, for which we simply need a better tool to handle - carbon monoxide, soot, extinction, flashover behavior, and what happens when ventilation disappears. At the IAFSS symposium, we sit down with Professor Bart Merci (Ghent University), fresh off delivering the Howard Emmons Invited Plenary Lecture, to talk ...

A timber column can survive the heating phase of a fire resistance test and still collapse later, after the flames are gone. We know there is so much more to structures in fires than the test demonstrates, but how much exactly do we know about timber nowadays? In this episode we try to dive deeper and discuss mass timber fire safety, structural fire engineering, and what a fire resistance rating does and does not tell us. I’m joined by Dr. Felix Wiesner from the University of British Columbia, t...

Fire science should have its place at the fireground, yet I've learned how hard it is to communicate it with the key stakeholder - the firefighters. It's not my isolated experience, and that tension drives our conversation with Steve Kerber, Vice President at UL Research Institutes Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI). Today we dig into the real craft of communicating fire dynamics to firefighters without losing the truth of the science. We talk about why experience alone can mislead when e...

A national fire statistics system that updates in weeks is not a statistics system, it is a history lesson. We talk with Dr. Craig Weinschenk from UL Research Institutes - Fire Safety Research Institute about NERIS (the National Emergency Response Information System) and why it represents a real shift in fire incident reporting, emergency response data, and fire service analytics across the United States. We trace the arc from NFIRS, built for paper forms and rigid codes, to a modern cloud based...

Jumping straight to CFD has become the default move in fire safety engineering, but that habit can quietly weaken our work: more inputs, more assumptions, more ways to be wrong, and often no clearer link to the actual design question. We sit down with Craig Hofmeister and Brian Klein to unpack a practical, defensible way to choose the right fire model for the job using the SFPE guideline “Substantiating a Fire Model for a Given Application.” The broad framework of this work is to define the phen...

“Two people per parking space” is one of those default fire engineering inputs that we are very used to place into a model without really thinking much of it. But it is one of those defaults that show a huge richness once you dig deeper. Are all parking spaces taken? Are people in their cars? What are they doing? How long have they been there concurrently... We take that simple rule and pull on the thread until it turns into a full conversation about evidence, uncertainty, and what “credible max...

A fire strategy can be technically correct, but if the team building the building never truly understands it - goals and objectives may be missed. For the 250th Fire Science Show, we slow down and talk about the craft of communicating fire science to construction professionals so that the intent survives real projects, real deadlines, and real handovers. This episode is an extended version of my talk I gave recently at the IAFSS Research Sub-Committee Workshop, which we have organised with Felix...

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 qu...

Fire safety in Europe is shaped in a challenging ecosystem - each member country owns its fire safety rules, yet the construction market, standards, and technical language are increasingly shared. I’m joined by Francesca Sciarretta, Scientific Project Officer at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), to explain how the JRC supports EU decision-making with independent research and why that “science behind the policy” matters for every practicing fire safety engineer. We unpack wha...

You don’t always need a furnace to end up with a fire resistance rating, but you do need to understand what kind of “proof” you’re actually creating. I’m joined again by Dr. Piotr Turkowski from ITB to unpack calculation methods for fire resistance and the real-world chain from engineering assumptions to a Declaration of Performance. We talk about when standards and European Assessment Documents (EADs) explicitly allow Eurocode-based assessment, and how different methods will lead you to your re...

In this episode of fire fundamentals with the ITB fire resistance expert Piotr Turkowski we break down what a fire resistance rating criteria, and what the letters behind ratings like “REI 60” exactly stand for. We use lab experience to explain where the standards are clear, where they are oddly traditional, and where comparisons between products can mislead. • ISO definition of fire resistance as an ability over time • What R E I W and M mean in fire resistance classification • Load bearing cap...

plume_rise_1.fds from the FDS Validation Guide (by NIST) &HEAD CHID='plume_rise_1', TITLE='Test plume rise height in stable atmosphere' / &MESH IJK=50,52,50, XB=-50.,50.,-52.,52.,0.,100., MULT_ID='mesh1' / &MULT ID='mesh1', DZ=100., K_UPPER=1 / &MESH IJK=50,52,50, XB= 50.,250.,-104.,104.,0.,200., MULT_ID='mesh2' / &MULT ID='mesh2', DZ=200., K_UPPER=1 / &MESH IJK=50,50,50, XB=250.,650.,-200.,200.,0.,400., MULT_ID='mesh3' / &MULT ID='mesh3', DX=400., DZ=400., ...

When one takes a decision to evacuate and starts moving, this is not the end of their decision-making process. Which route to take? Who to contact? How to arrange a place of shelter? Where to go first? Have I forgotten anything? I previously discussed the decision-making with Erica Kuligowski from RMIT, and today we're meeting again to follow up on decision-making for large-scale evacuations. We focus on choices and uncertainties that make many of the evacuees take additional trips, and those tr...

A fire in an informal settlement is not just another small building fire. It can be the first domino in a fast-moving neighborhood event, and the little details like the wall material, roof material, door location, even a light breeze, can decide what happens next. I’m joined by Dr. Sam Stevens from Kindling to unpack a massive FSRI funded experimental program carried out in South Africa that burned twenty different informal and humanitarian shelter types to measure real heat flux, flame extensi...

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 b...

Is it too late to start with the AI in 2026? It wen't so far, does it still make sense to get interested in this technology? Absolutely. Today we sit down with MZ Naser of Clemson University to map a clear, useful path for engineers who want results without the hype. We start with the basics - clean data, the right algorithm, and a realistic mindset - and climb toward explainability, causality, and even philosophy to show where AI informs decisions and where it can quietly mislead. We dig in...

I’m not stressed by AI itself. I’m stressed by the insatiable greed of those who profit from it, even if it means sacrificing large parts of the population. I'm also stressed about how ruthlessly it can be abused to cause deliberate harm. In this episode I'm not taking you into world of fire science, but rather into my own thoughts on how the AI revolution influences our lives. And I was influenced it just last week - through a phishing attack on the IAFSS, and through reading a very disturbing ...

A tunnel can ride out a fire without collapsing (or even critical visible structural damage), but a question whether it is safe for operations, and what is its long-term residual fire resistance remains. With repair bills being in high seven-eight figures, this is more than just a theoretical question... In this episode we dig into the hard middle ground of fire damage post mild/large fires, and cover where modeling and fire science can help reducing the uncertainty and guiding decisions. With P...

Welcome to another fire fundamentals episode! Today we dig into how to place a fire in a model so results reflect real physics. From plume inputs to FDS burners, we show where HRRPUA, radiative fraction, and D* make or break smoke your calculations. Things considered in this episode: • why defining the design HRR is separate from placing the source • what a flame is and why we cannot resolve its chemistry • plume models compared by inputs: perimeter, Q, Qc • entrainment, virtual origin, and effe...

Welcome back to Fire Fundamentals! Today with prof. Ali Rangwala from WPI and dr Lorenz Boeck from Rembe and WPI we take the world of explosion protection engineering. In this episode we touch: • distinguishing fires and explosions by time scale and damage mode • taxonomy of explosions by energy density and deposition time • hybrid mixtures in coal mines and turbulent burning velocity • severity metrics for gases and dust deflagration index for reactivity • explosion sphere testing, ignition pos...

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 inste...

A fire in a public venue happened again. No, I am not talking about the one in Switzerland. Since the tragic New Year celebration, we had one more near-miss in Madrid on Jan 10th 2026... In fact, who knows how many we actually had? It is a tragedy that feels like it is playing on repeat... In this podcast episode, we try to dig into why nightclub fires follow the same script decade after decade—what are the parts of the pattern, and what can we do through smarter design, honest modelling, and re...