The relation between ventilation conditions and fire severity is quite a fundamental one. You don't even have to be a fire safety engineer to realize that more air means a bigger fire. But how does air get into the compartment fire in the first place?

Through broken windows of course!

And here we come to the subject of today's episode. Because with all the considerable improvements in glazing technologies for building facades, is it really okay to assume that the glazing has failed and all we are left is a giant hole that allows the air flow inside? How does the glass fail, and when and what exactly are the consequences of this failure? These are the questions asked to professor Wang Yu of the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) at USTC, China. Yu takes me through his research from his PhD at Edinburgh, and through more recent experiments carried out by his group in China. We discuss FEM modelling of glass and some specific behaviour of modern glazing technologies exposed to different kinds of fires.

If you would like to learn more about this fundamental topic, here are some great further reading resources (Yu has so far 29 papers on this subject and these are just the tip of the iceberg!):

• Experimental study on fallout behaviour of tempered glass façades with different frame insulation conditions in an enclosure fire
• Investigation of the thermal response and breakage mechanism of point-supported glass facade under wind load
• Determination of critical fallout condition of tempered glass in an enclosure fire
• The effect of glass panel dimension on the fire response of glass façades
• Crack evolution process of window glass under radiant heating
• Determination of critical breakage conditions for double glazing in fire

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