Episodes
Jan. 26, 2022
035 - Fire safety as cornerstone of sustainability with Margaret McNamee
Building a fire-safe future is not an easy task. Including sustainability in that build, is even harder. But how hard is it to include fire safety in the discussion, when sustainability itself is a goal? Does sustainability …
Jan. 19, 2022
034 - Fire safety as a human right, not a privilege with Danielle Antonellis
There are topics in fire science that gain more attention than others. Timber in fire. Batteries. Facades. They are novel, complex, challenging and yet as engineers, we must handle them in our everyday job. But are they impo…
Jan. 12, 2022
033 - Science, theatre or engineering? Polish take on hot smoke test with Piotr Smardz and Janusz Paliszek
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 …
Dec. 22, 2021
032 - Closing the year with a look back on 2021 and forward to the future!
Welcome to the final episode of this year! I hope you all had a great year. For me, it was probably the most challenging, and the most rewarding year of my whole professional career. Join me in this episode recollecting the …
Dec. 15, 2021
031 - Suppressing tunnel fires with water mist with Johny Jessen
Can water mist be used in tunnels? I wondered that for a long time, and with every tunnel project, many questions around this issue were piling in my head. When dealing with large infrastructure projects you really need to w…
Dec. 8, 2021
030 - Visibility Prediction Framework with Lukas Arnold
If you ever had anything to do with Fire Safety Engineering, you have most likely touched the visibility in smoke. What's an easier way to explain how bad the conditions are inside of a building than saying how much smoke wa…
Dec. 1, 2021
029 -Busses, flammability and an unknown force holding good solutions back... with Anja Hofmann-Böllinghaus
This is not a fun episode. It starts with a tragedy, that fueled a whole field of research. Continues into disbelief, that one aspect of fire safety can be at the same chosen as the sole foundation of fire safety within a br…
Nov. 24, 2021
028 - Easy entry into the world of AI in fire with MZ Naser
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…
Nov. 17, 2021
027 - Travelling fires with Guillermo Rein
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…
Nov. 10, 2021
026 - Field report from IWMA conference in Warsaw
Thanks to the courtesy of the International Water Mist Association I have been invited to the recent conference held in Warsaw. The conference was a two-day event focused on water mist technology. In fact, it was the 20th me…
Nov. 3, 2021
025 - Structural fire engineering with engineered timber with Felix Wiesner
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 …
Oct. 27, 2021
024 - Who's a Fire Safety Engineer with Jimmy Jönsson
Who is a Fire Safety Engineer? And when do you become one? How do you know the person on the other side of the table at the project meeting has the necessary competencies to judge fire safety solutions of a building you desi…
Oct. 20, 2021
023 - Risk assessment with Maximum Allowable Damage with Jaime Cadena Gomez and David Lange
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…
Oct. 13, 2021
022 - Combustion, fluid mechanics and fire safety engineering with Michael Gollner
https://firelab.berkeley.edu/ this is the place you need to go! Ignition at different slope angles. Firebrand spotting. Fire whirls. What does connect these various fire phenomena? They are all driven by fluid dynamics and c…
Oct. 5, 2021
021 - Resilient design for firefighter safety with Ali Ashrafi
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 …
Sept. 29, 2021
020 - Fire Safety Engineering as a socio-technical system with Brian Meacham
Do you sometimes feel that fire safety engineering is not making a footprint as it should? With all our knowledge, models, technology...why do huge fires exist? Why fire is such a threat to billions of humans? In today's epi…
Sept. 21, 2021
019 - Modelling human behaviour in wildfire evacuation with Erica Kuligowski
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…
Sept. 15, 2021
018 - Engineered timber with Danny Hopkin
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 …
Sept. 8, 2021
017 - Pyrolife - from fire resistance to fire resilience with Cathelijne Stoof
When you think about battling wildfires, what is the image you see in front of your eyes? Probably an air tanker (at least that was what I saw...). After this interview, your optics will change about 180 degrees. Dr Cathelij…
Sept. 1, 2021
016 - The future of evacuation modelling with Enrico Ronchi and Ruggiero Lovreglio
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…
Aug. 25, 2021
015 - Global view on the fire safety from a starchitect perpective with Benjamin Ralph
Have you ever wondered who truly has the most power over the fire safety of a building? In my opinion, the answer is very simple - the Architect. This is due to two reasons. First is that the architect can affect the buildin…
Aug. 18, 2021
014 - A joyrney through the scales of fire phenomena with Sara McAllister
Have you ever wondered how is a fire of a match or candle different from a wildfire? Or maybe rather, why is it different? What is it, that makes the fires at different scales behave in such a different manner? What are the …
Aug. 11, 2021
013 - On the use and abuse of CFD in fire engineering with Wolfram Jahn
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 …
Aug. 4, 2021
012 - Science, Industry, Legislators. How do we make them work together on a fire safe world? - Kees Both
In this episode, I had the pleasure and privilege to host dr Kees Both, the Technical Manager of Standards & Regulations in Etexgroup. Kees wanted to become a suspension bridge engineer, but his route went through a fire lab…