Fire Science Show

270 - How the Cone Calorimeter took over with Marc Janssens

A tool doesn’t become a global workhorse because it’s clever. It becomes a workhorse when different labs can run it, calibrate it, compare it, and trust it. It is a very

269 - Fire investigations and the scientific method with Vincent Brannigan

A fire scene looks like a puzzle, but it’s a puzzle where the pieces melt, burn, and get hauled away before anyone can measure them. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I si

268 - Is critical velocity that critical?

Critical velocity is supposed to be the clean moment when tunnel smoke control flips from unsafe to safe. But after too many real projects and too many review battles, I

267 - Modelling Fire Growth with Stephen Welch

Pretty CFD flames are something we got used to, but they usually are a product of our design assumptions - the design fire. While they give us a lovely illusion of being

266 - Compartment fire framework with Vinny Gupta

A compartment fire is more than just “a fire in a room.” The moment flames, smoke, and heat are trapped by walls and fed through openings, the physics changes and so do t

265 - How fires can lead to a nuclear winter? with Stephen Welch

As a kid of 80s and 90s, a lot of the pop culture was around the post-apocalyptic scenarios following a nuclear exchange. I always thought a nuclear winter is a consequen

264 - Engineering Firebrand Showers with Samuel L. Manzello

A wind-driven ember shower is a key wildfire exposures a building can face, but we have not yet fully understood or accounted for them in making our communities wildfire

263 - Developments in modelling WUI fires with Arnaud Trouvé

Wildland-Urban Interface fires are a class of fires that deserves own models, own studies and a lot of research focus. This is what I discuss today with prof. Arnaud Trou

262 - Fire Fundamentals pt. 22 - Optical diagnostics in fire with Elizabeth Weckman

In todays episode of fire fundamentals we talk with Professor Elizabeth Weckman from University of Waterloo about advanced optical diagnostics that let fire researchers r

261 - The story of the Cone Calorimeter with Vyto Babrauskas

The cone calorimeter sits in thousands of labs, shaping what we know about flammability, smoke production, and heat release rate. This essential piece of equipment comes

260 - Fire safety in a carbon budget with Cecilia Wetterqvist and Axel Mossberg

A carbon budget can feel like a hard wall in modern building design, and once you treat CO2 as currency, everything starts competing for a slice of it. The problem is tha

259 - Communicating fire science with politicians with Birgitte Messerschmidt

Fire safety is a tough “product” to sell because the best outcome looks like nothing happened. That’s exactly why we sat down with Birgitte Messerschmidt (NFPA) to talk a

258 - e-mobility fires in trains with Adam Barowy

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 move

257 - Fire Fundamentals pt. 21 - Radiation with Simo Hostikka

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

256 - Modelling turbulent combustion in fire CFD with Bart Merci

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 f

255 - Timber load bearing capacity in fire from nano- to megascale with Felix Wiesner

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 i

254 - Communicating fire science with firefighters, with Steve Kerber

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

253 - NERIS - the paradigm shift for the US fire data collection with Craig Weinschenk

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

252 - Substantiating Fire Models with Craig Hofmeister and Bryan Klein

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

251 - Occupant loads in Car Parks with Mike Spearpoint

“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 o