In the 16th part of the Fire Fundamentals series, we invite Randy McDermott from NIST to join us for a deep dive into turbulence and its critical role in fire dynamics modelling. We explore the physics behind turbulent combustion and how it fundamentally shapes fire behaviour, plume dynamics, and simulation accuracy.

In this episode we cover:

• Defining turbulence as the enhancement of mixing and heat transfer through the creation of eddies and instabilities
• Understanding length scales in turbulence from the integral scale to the Kolmogorov scale
• Practical considerations when choosing grid resolutions for different fire engineering applications
• How turbulence models work in Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and what they represent
• Limitations of the D* criterion for mesh sizing and why higher resolution may be needed
• Differences between pre-mixed and diffusion flames in turbulent combustion
• Time scales in fire and the concept of Damköhler number in determining combustion behaviour
• Entrainment physics at the base of fire plumes requires centimetre-scale resolution
• Why turbulence modelling ultimately determines the accuracy of fire simulations

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

In this podcast episode, I invited Chris Jelenewicz, the CEO of SFPE, to bring me up to date on the society. The SFPE Handbook on Fire Protection Engineering is undergoing a major revision with the sixth edition expected by summer's end, expanding to five volumes with significant new content on emerging topics like wildland fires and lithium-ion batteries. In this episode, we cover how the handbook is written, edited and when it will be released to the public.

Some highlights from the episode include:
• The new handbook will feature 11 sections, 104 chapters, and contributions from over 200 authors
• New innovative "living document" approach allowing updates without waiting for full revision cycles
• First-ever introductory chapter on the history and evolution of fire protection engineering
• Expanded content on wildland-urban interface fires, growing from one chapter to seven
• New chapters addressing lithium-ion batteries, fire safety during construction, and fire extinguishment fundamentals
• Multiple access options: print volumes, online subscription, and individual chapter purchases
• Available through university libraries via SpringerLink
• More global perspective with international contributions 

We have also discussed the incoming SFPE events, including the Annual Conference in Vancouver (October 2025), celebrating SFPE's 75th anniversary, a Storage Symposium at UL in Chicago (August 2025), and a Battery Symposium in Lisbon (November 2025).

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Water might seem like the simplest part of firefighting – just point and spray, right? Well, as you can imagine, the reality is a bit more complex. In this conversation with veteran firefighter and CFBT instructor Szymon Kokot, we pull back the curtain on firefighting's most critical resource to reveal the intricate science and logistics behind effective fire suppression.

Did you know a standard fire truck carries just 10 minutes' worth of water for a typical residential fire? Or that a water-filled fire hose can weigh up to 45 kilograms per 20-meter section? These physical realities shape every aspect of firefighting operations and explain why building water supply systems are absolutely vital for effective emergency response.

Szymon walks us through essential concepts that every fire engineer should understand – from critical flow rates (2 liters per minute per square meter of fire area) to tactical flow rates (4 liters per minute per square meter) that provide both effectiveness and safety margin. We explore how water's cooling capacity works primarily during evaporation, why cooling burning materials is more important than extinguishing visible flames, and how different water application techniques serve different tactical purposes.

The conversation demystifies hydrants versus standpipes, dry versus wet systems, and the specialised requirements for different building types – especially the unique challenges of high-rise structures where external water supply is virtually impossible. We also confront the all-too-common reliability issues that plague these systems, from maintenance problems to vandalism.

Whether you're a fire engineer looking to design more effective systems, a firefighter interested in the science behind your craft, or simply curious about this intersection of physics, engineering and emergency operations, this episode delivers valuable insights into how water – our oldest firefighting tool – continues to shape modern fire safety design and operations.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

As a consequence of the Grenfell Tower disaster, some strong legislation was proposed, such as a combustible ban on building walls. This, however, affected more than just the building facades, as it excluded materials such as laminated glass used as balcony balustrades. 

Today, the path forward demands evidence that could inform decisions on the future of laminated glass in this use. In this conversation with Mike Spearpoint and Konstantinos Chotzoglou from OFR Consultants, we dive deep into their groundbreaking experimental research on balcony fire safety that emerged in response to the Grenfell Tower disaster.

Through experiments involving three-story balcony setups and multiple configurations, the team quantified how different materials and designs affect external fire spread between floors.

What makes this research particularly valuable is how it transforms gut feelings into measurable facts. The researchers tested various combinations of balustrade materials, decking options, and balcony contents to create a comprehensive picture of fire behaviour. Their findings confirmed some expectations while providing surprising insights into flame dynamics around balconies. Most importantly, they established a clear ranking of safety performance: from non-combustible systems and laminated glass (which performed remarkably well) to the dangerous combination of HPL panels with timber decking (which produced fires so intense they had to terminate testing).

The implications extend beyond regulatory compliance. This research empowers architects, engineers, and manufacturers to make evidence-based decisions about balcony design while maintaining the essential outdoor spaces people value in high-rise living. It demonstrates that with appropriate material selections and protective measures like non-combustible soffits, balconies can remain both safe and functional.

You can read the balcony survey paper here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-023-01467-8

A paper summarising three balcony fire incidents:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-021-01154-6

As more research is published, I will try to keep this up to date.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Today I'm taking you for a sightseeing trip to see what fire safety looks like beyond our usual office, residential buildings and car parks. Fire engineering takes on an entirely different dimension when applied to massive infrastructure projects where conventional building codes provide minimal guidance and engineers must forge their own path.

Dr. Mukesh Tomar from Jacobs takes us deep into the world of "non-real estate fire engineering" – the complex realm of cable tunnels stretching dozens of kilometres, nuclear facilities requiring marathon-like design processes, and mega-airports that function as entire cities. These projects demand fundamentally different approaches from traditional buildings, with engineers often working without clear objectives while balancing multiple stakeholders' requirements.

The challenges are as fascinating as they are daunting. How do you establish evacuation strategies for maintenance workers in remote utility tunnels? What happens when nuclear safety requirements from different global standards conflict with each other? And how do you integrate new fire safety systems with decades-old infrastructure during airport expansions? We explore these questions while uncovering the frustrations and rewards of engineering at this scale.

Perhaps most thought-provoking is how these specialised challenges are increasingly relevant to everyday buildings. As electric vehicle charging brings industrial-scale electrical systems into residential buildings, the line between conventional and infrastructure fire safety grows increasingly blurred. Without clear objectives and specialised expertise, are we adequately addressing these emerging risks?

Whether you're a seasoned infrastructure engineer or working primarily in traditional buildings, this episode offers valuable insights into the outer boundaries of fire safety engineering and the critical importance of establishing clear objectives before attempting solutions. Follow the Fire Science Show for more deep dives into the fascinating world where fire science meets real-world engineering challenges.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Dr Randy McDermott takes us behind the scenes of fire science's most critical software tool in this conversation about the Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) developed at NIST. As one of the developers, Randy offers valuable insights into how this essential modelling tool is maintained, improved, and adapted to meet the evolving challenges of the fire safety community.

The conversation begins with a look at the development process itself, based on a greater picture roadmap and also addressing practical issues reported by users. This balance between vision and responsiveness has helped FDS maintain its position as the gold standard in fire modelling. Randy unpacks the massive validation guide (over 1,200 pages) and explains how users should approach it to understand model capabilities and uncertainties. 

The guide, along with all the validation cases, is available at Github repository here: https://github.com/firemodels/fds

Rather than blindly applying FDS to any problem, he emphasises the importance of identifying similar validated cases and understanding the limitations of the software for specific applications. The discussion tackles emerging challenges like battery fires and mass timber construction – areas where traditional fire modelling approaches face significant hurdles. Randy addresses the limitations of current models while outlining pathways for future development, including potential integration with external specialised models and improvements in chemistry modelling.

Finally, we also get to talk about computational costs and efficiency. As Randy explains the implementation of GPU acceleration and the challenges of incorporating detailed chemistry, listeners gain a deeper appreciation of the tradeoffs involved in advanced fire modelling.

Whether you're an FDS user, fire safety engineer, or simply curious about computational modelling, this episode offers valuable perspectives on the past, present and future of the tool that underpins modern fire safety science. 

Oh, and Randy is not just an FDS developer - he is also a prolific researcher. You can find more about his scientific works here: https://www.nist.gov/people/randall-j-mcdermott

As always, MASSIVE THANKS TO THE NIST GROUP AND THEIR COLLABORATORS FOR BUILDING AND MAINTAINING THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PIECE OF SOFTWARE WE HAVE!!! You guys are not thanked enough!

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Four years ago, what began as a mission to preserve valuable fire safety engineering conversations has grown into a fairly large platform connecting professionals across 170+ countries. The journey to 200 episodes and nearly 200,000 downloads has been both challenging and deeply rewarding – in this episode, I share a bit about my journey, the state of things and the near future of the podcast. 

*** Important notice: at the end of the show notes is a survey, and I would be thrilled if you participated in it. Back to the news post ***

Behind every weekly episode lies 10-12 hours of preparation, recording, and editing. From coordinating with international guests across time zones to balancing out the technical depth and accessibility, producing the Fire Science Show has become a finely-tuned process. Some recordings happen at 5 AM, some late at night, all to bring the most valuable fire science conversations to your ears.

This special anniversary episode pulls back the curtain on what makes the podcast work. You'll discover how episodes are created from concept to publication, learn about memorable moments (like the great LEGO collapse catastrophe during an interview with my podcasting idol Pat Flynn), and hear about challenges faced along the way. The most popular episodes – including fundamentals with Rory (2,500 listens) and timber fire safety with Danny Hopkin (1,800 listens) reveal what resonates most with our community of listeners. But all episodes are important, as they together create a space where complex fire science becomes accessible and engaging for professionals worldwide.

As we look toward the future, your input is essential. What topics should we cover? What format works best for you? The listener survey linked in our show notes is your chance to help shape the Fire Science Show's next chapter. Join us as we continue bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and practical application in fire safety engineering.

>>>> LINK TO THE SURVEY <<<<

Lastly, but also very important. Massive shout out to the OFR for making this journey possible. If not you, we would not be celebrating this anniversary. Thank you so much for your support to the concept of freely accessible high-quality CPD delivered to any part of the world, any time someone feels like it!

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

I've finally done it. We've repeated Jin's experiment! I thought I knew-it-all about that experiment, but boy... knowing and doing it are two different things. I can say, I've finally cleared my mind on some thoughts after this, which I am finally happy to share with all of you!

First things first, massive thanks to my partner in crime Wai-Kit Wilson Cheung, from the group of prof. Xinyan Huang, who was the man on the ground doing the experiments with me. Together we went further into this model, than ever before. 

The revelations are far-reaching. We found that Jin used extraordinary lighting conditions—180 lux background brightness and impossibly bright signage—far from realistic building emergency conditions. Background brightness emerges as perhaps the most critical factor in determining what can be seen through smoke, with dramatic differences between light-emitting and light-reflecting signs. Most significantly, the experiment's careful constraint of sign size (using proportionally larger signs at greater distances) created elegant mathematics but removed a crucial real-world variable from the model.

These insights have profound implications. Engineers likely overestimate visibility in many scenarios, particularly with reflective signage. The widely used K-values (3 for reflective signs, 8 for light-emitting signs) appear reasonably conservative for typical building conditions, though higher values might be warranted in darker environments. Most provocatively, simply increasing sign size would almost certainly improve evacuation safety, yet our current models provide no mechanism to quantify this benefit.

Fire safety practitioners will find this episode transformative, offering both practical guidance and theoretical understanding. Should we stick with visibility distance or shift to smoke density as our primary metric? How can we balance lighting conditions to optimize visibility of both obstacles and signage? And most critically, how might next-generation visibility models better serve real-world building safety? These are things we currently work on.

If you look for reading, check the paper on the extinction coefficient by the German colleagues:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.16182

If you strive for more podcast episodes:

• this one covers historical Jin's experiment: https://www.firescienceshow.com/162-experiments-that-changed-fire-science-pt-9-jins-experiment-on-visibility-in-smoke/
• this one is on soot and smoke: https://www.firescienceshow.com/163-fire-fundamentals-pt-11-soot-in-fire-safety-engineering/
• and this one our general thoughts about modelling visibility and new pathways we see forward: https://www.firescienceshow.com/030-visibility-prediction-framework-with-lukas-arnold/

The research was funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, based on a contract for the implementation and financing of a research project OPUS LAP No 2020/39/I/ST8/03159 and by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under the project number 465392452, for the joint project: “Visibility Prediction Framework – a next-generation model for visibility in smoke in built environment”. 

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

The gap between fire safety engineering and firefighting operations creates a profound challenge that affects building safety worldwide. Even experienced fire safety engineers - myself included - face uncertainty when designing for firefighters without being firefighters themselves. Yet many building codes explicitly require engineers to account for firefighting operations in their designs.

This examination dives into the timeline analysis essential for effective firefighter support, from notification (when firefighters learn about the fire) to arrival at the building to actual intervention. Each phase contains complexities often overlooked: fire alarm systems might be delayed by human verification, architectural complexity can significantly slow down firefighters reaching the fire, and building conditions upon arrival dramatically affect intervention capabilities.

The assessment of design fires represents one of the most challenging aspects of this engineering work. At what fire size will firefighters begin their intervention? The fire might be growing, steady-state, limited by compartmentation, or controlled by active systems. This crucial but uncertain consideration fundamentally shapes how we design for firefighter safety.

Through computational fluid dynamics modelling, we can evaluate the building conditions firefighters will face. Rather than using simple pass/fail criteria, experienced engineers look for smoke layer behaviour and clear access paths. The gold standard is providing smoke-free routes from the building entry to the fire vicinity. When this isn't possible, we must carefully evaluate the conditions through which firefighters must navigate.

Fire safety systems - from sprinklers to smoke control, information displays to architectural layouts - all dramatically influence firefighter effectiveness. Yet perhaps the most important principle is creating systems firefighters trust. Overly complex designs may be disabled by firefighters who don't understand them or don't trust them with their lives.

The most effective approach combines rigorous engineering analysis with direct input from firefighters themselves. By understanding their actual needs, which might surprise you - we can design buildings that truly support those willing to risk everything to save others. What would your building design look like if you asked firefighters what they really need?

Listen to the entire episode with Szymon Kokot here: https://www.firescienceshow.com/051-fire-science-in-eyes-of-a-firefighter-with-szymon-kokot/

Want to know what happens in the building after a fire alarm? Find out here: https://www.firescienceshow.com/136-fire-fundamentals-pt-6-the-fire-automation-in-a-building/

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

What happens when a lifetime of studying industrial fire hazards meets the creative mind of a novelist? In this conversation with Professor Joaquim Casal, we explore the unique intersection of fire safety engineering and science fiction through his novel "The Last Fire."

Professor Casal, a retired academic from Universitat Politécnica Catalunya and founder of their fire research group, has crafted something unique – a  novel where the protagonists are fire researchers and the plot revolves around fire phenomena, fire research and fire testing. 

Beyond the novel on its own, our discussion also takes us deep into the world of industrial fire hazards, exploring phenomena that many building-focused fire engineers rarely encounter. From the extreme temperatures of jet fires that can trigger catastrophic "domino effects" in industrial facilities to the deadly "boil-over" phenomenon that has claimed numerous firefighters' lives. We examine the behaviours of jet-fires, pool fires, flash fires, and the spectacular but devastating fireballs created by BLEVEs (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosions).

And finally, I think the greatest imminent value of this novel is in the communication - it is a brilliant example of how you can communicate difficult technical concepts of fire to lay people. I believe many fire engineers could be inspired by this example.

If you would like to read the novel, it is available at Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Fire-Joaquim-Casal-ebook/dp/B0F4QYLYSV

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.