Episodes

EVs are becoming more of a 'normal' part of fire safety engineering rather than an 'exotic problem'. I've invited two colleagues from Thornton Tomasetti - Ali Ashrafi and Pawel Woelke, to discuss what this engineering looks l...

Fires in the waste industry are not discussed much unless one sees a giant smoke plume in the media, followed by advice to close your windows. In these (rare?) cases, we remind ourselves of the massive industry related to sto...

In this episode we talk with Jonathan Hodges of the Jensen Hughes on his experience with using advanced modelling in the realm of fire safety engineering. Jonathan sheds light on how the modelling is used at various Jensen Hu...

In the everchanging world every now and then we get a new driver, that dictates most of our choices. In the current built environment and building industry, carbon dioxide feels like such a driver. We don't like it, we want t...

Is the "best practice" always the best approach to solving an engineering problem? Can we consider "best" and "appropriate" practices synonymous, and if not - how big is the gap between them? Join us as we welcome Professor A...

The l ast time I had Xinyan on the show was in 2021, and we were all excited about the possibilities that AI could bring to Fire Safety Engineering and Smart Firefighting. Three years have passed, and while we are still excit...

Soot is perhaps the most complex product of combustion, and at the same time one of the most profound for our everyday fire safety engineering. The topic of soot is not getting much love in the world of fire science, so I’ve ...

In this episode of Experiments that Changed Fire Science we cover T. Jin’s experiments on the visibility in smoke – two experiments carried out in 1970 and 1971 in Japan that truly changed the way how we model fires and how w...

Is evacuation of a community during a wildfire largely different from evacuation of a building? How much of the knowledge from the building fires is directly useful in planning and managing such an event, and what stuff is co...

In the episode 10 of fire fundamentals together with David Morrisset, a nearly graduated PhD student from the University of Edinburgh, we explore the intricate dynamics of flame spread and its crucial role in fire safety engi...

With two Directors at NFPA - Michele Steinberg and Birgitte Messerschmidt, I'm trying to find an answer to a burning question - " what really is the WUI problem?" The WUI is not just a line on a map with an X distance from th...

In today's Fire Science Show, we talk about how boundary conditions can make or break your fire simulation models. We'll explore boundary conditions' fundamental role in defining how simulations interact with their environmen...

A critical velocity episode... who would have thought? Even though I'm not an enthusiast of this approach, I have to admire the new science and researchers striving to improve it. This week I welcome Conrad Stacey and Michael...

What if you could predict the last possible time to evacuate your community before a wildfire wreaks havoc? What if you had that knowledge years before the wildfires happened and built up your preparedness based on this knowl...

Misconceptions in fire science are a strange thing. You present countless proof, publish research papers, and carry conversations, and yet… they live their own lives—spreading with no control and cluttering communication. One...

Happy birthday, Fire Science Show! On the 3rd Anniversary of the podcast launch, I'm thrilled to deliver an episode on one of the most fascinating aspects of fire science - the compartment fire. Instead of going through the u...

I'm very sorry, but I could not finalize the episode to air this week in time, and in consequence, I have chosen to have a short technical break in the podcast. We will return next week with a (hopefully) really exciting epis...

A few weeks ago in Copenhagen, stepping onto the stage to open the SFPE Fire Safety Conference and Expo on Performance-Based Design, I took a bit of a gamble. I was invited to give an opening keynote, but instead of talking a...

In this episode, we dive into standardization efforts for fire safety. An entire universe of testing laboratories, committees, auditors, and certifiers work together to provide product end-user fire safety classification. So,...

The fire is detected in the building. Please evacuate. Do not use the elevator. I’ve heard this emergency message perhaps a thousand times. It is deeply engraved in my mind to the extent that the moment I hear the first beep ...

Wind turbine fires - are they an issue, or are they not? In this episode, I am joined by Prof. Guillermo Rein of the Imperial College London, who raised this issue 10 years ago at the IAFSS conference, and I believe we still ...

CROSS UK is Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures in UK. CROSS is a confidential reporting system which allows professionals working in the built environment to report on fire and structural safety issues. These are th...

In this episode of the Fire Science Show we go in depth on the Building Integrated Photo-Voltaic systems (BIPV). It is a topic relevant to many fire engineers, and one on which it is very difficult to find a lot of informatio...

In this episode, we explore wildfire's impact on industrial fire safety with Professor Eulàlia Planas from Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya. Eulalia defines the term Wildland Industrial Interface (WII), a realm where the...