Fire Science Show

Why so many researchers are spending their time tackling fire issues at the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI)? What is so challenging about this? We always lived near nature, why today this emerges as one of the 'hottest' topics of fire science? As my today's guest Prof. Michael Gollner says - you need a very bad combination of weather and vegetation conditions to create a really bad fire. However, these conditions are occurring more and more often - in California they are not even considering fire seasons anymore, but wildfires become a threat all year round. I don't want to jump to unsupported conclusions, but damn, the prominence of wildfires seems to be the consequence of climate change that we will see soonest, and will hurt us a lot.

In this episode, we take fire engineers into the world of WUI. We try to narrow down WHY fires coming from the outside are so dangerous and so different from threats we know. We discuss the paradigms of fire safety engineering and WUI preparedness, including defendable zones, threats from firebrands and the effects of wildfire smoke on the occupants. 

Finally, Michael shares with me his own experience with evacuating from a wildfire - a disturbing and interesting perspective of a fire scientist experiencing this first-hand. 

Please take a look at these wildfire and WUI resources:

• Michaels Fire Lab group webpage (with an endless amount of useful stuff in it)
• IBHS Wildfire Preparedness Guidance 
• NFPA Wildfire Division

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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 factors influence the walking speed of an occupant? Is it just their physiology and crowd density? It seems it is more complicated than that (as most things are in fire science...). Dr John Gales of York University takes me on a journey through their extremally interesting research on anthropomorphic data and movement speeds, which they have been extensively carrying through the last years. You will learn why the crowd at a football match will have a different characteristic than one attending American football (handegg?). Why evacuation is quicker in torrential rain than in fire, and how stimuli may drive the walking speeds as well. And how a beer tent helped uncover that!

John has mentioned a lot of resources that may be of interest.

The online course mentioned by John is available at: https://uwaterloo.ca/fire-research-and-safety/fire-safety-program and a course outline may be found here.
Learn more about the York Fire Engineering group at https://yorkufire.com/
The  SFPE Foundation report cited in the episode can be found here.

A list of relevant papers is available below:

1.  Chin, K., Young, T., Chorlton, B., Aucoin, D., and Gales, J., (2022) Crowd Behaviour in Canadian Football Stadia - Part 1 - Data Collection. Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering (Canadian Science Publishing). 49 (7)
2. Chin, K., Young, T., Chorlton, B., Aucoin, D., and Gales, J., (2022) Crowd Behaviour in Canadian Football Stadia - Part 2 - Modelling Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering (Canadian Science Publishing). 49 (7)
3.  Yerushalami, A., Folk, L., Carton, H., Gales, J., Khan A., Weckman, B. (2022) Fire Evacuation Modelling of a Canadian Wildland Urban Interface Community. Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering (Canadian Science Publishing). 49 (1) 
4.  Arce, S., Jeanneret, C., Gales, J, Antonellis, D., and Vaiciulyte, S. (2021) Human Behaviour in Informal Settlement Fires in Costa Rica. Safety Science (Elsevier). 142. 105384. 
5. Young, T., Gales, J, Kinsey M, and Wong W. (2021) Variability in Stadia Evacuation under Normal, High-Motivation, and Emergency Egress. Journal of Building Engineering (Elsevier). 40 
6.  Folk, L., Gonzales, K., Gales, J., Kinsey, M, and Carratin, E. and Young, T. (2020) Emergency Egress for the Elderly in Care Home Fire Situations. Fire and Materials (John Wiley). 44(4): 595- 606. 

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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.

We've felt a bit awkward about how FSE handles smoke control in corridors. If you look closely into common practices, they rarely do include impressive engineering - more often you see some 'tips and tricks' that make the CFD simulations work out and systems are accepted. Doors opening/closing in specific timeline points, heat source sizes or soot generation parameters... I agree it does not necessarily mean that all the systems are designed wrongfully, or they do not provide safety... but in fact - how can we tell what they provide if we are not evaluating them in a clear and robust way?

In this episode, I talk to my colleague from the ITB - Dr Grzegorz Krajewski, about a next-generation smoke control experimental facility that has just been built at the ITB. From this talk, you will learn what doubts we have about the modern approach to designing smoke control in corridors, how we want to study it with our new facility and how you can take part in defining a new 'point zero' for the future of the smoke control.

If you like what you hear, and you would like us to conduct a specific experiment in the new facility, please reach us! We will do everything we can to run 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 wonder if we will be ever able to say: we know exactly how to build fire-safe buildings with mass timber.  However that day may never come, each day of research brings us a little bit closer to achieving this goal. And some days - like the one in which Andy Buchanan and Birgit Östman published their open access handbook on fire-safe use timber, we definitely leap towards success!

In today's episode, I'm interviewing prof.  Andy Buchanan on his thoughts on fire-safe use of timber, in relation to the handbook published recently (Book website). We discuss why some buildings bring more challenges than others, and how different the mass timber compartment fire can be from a contemporary noncombustible structure. What do we know about the behaviour of timber, how engineers can predict that behaviour and how that knowledge is put into practice? This episode is not about the book, it is about a mindset of how to safely approach the challenges lying ahead.

Oh, and about that book I've mentioned... The best part - the Authors and sponsors have paid for it and it is accessible online. No tricks. You can download the pdf right here. Enjoy!

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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.

Will a higher resolution mesh make my CFD more accurate? That is a harmless question, and most of us would tend toward 'I guess yeah'. But let us try and unpack this. Into atoms! What does higher resolution mean? How exactly solver deals with increased spatial discretization and what are the exact consequences of that? What is a high resolution for a tiny orifice and what is a high resolution for a road tunnel? But it gets better... What makes CFD more accurate? Is it better alignment with experimental data - if so, do you know the experimental and numerical uncertainties that allow you to actually compare them? If not, how can you tell if the second try in the mesh sensitivity study is a disturbing result or something well within the numerical uncertainty?

Oh boy, such a simple question and so many things to answer.

And you have guessed it - that is what we are trying to do in this podcast episode with dr Jason Floyd of the UL Fire Safety Research Institute. And on top of that, you will learn a ton about mesh sensitivity and model uncertainties.  You will also know why some models are more difficult than others - especially when you start to play with fluid-solid interaction and pyrolysis.

This episode was inspired by Bryan Klein - props to Bryan! He was a guest on the podcast and we have covered a very similar topic in it - you may want to listen to it as well! The trigger to make this episode came from the issue tracker, and you may want to check that thread as well 

If you have some great podcast episode ideas, let me know! I'll get this done, I'm doing this whole thing for you.

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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.

This amount of heat flux for this amount of time, routine conditions, check, done. This is how I used to do my engineering and tenability assessment related to heat stress... up till today when prof Denisse Smith and prof Gavin Horn took me on a bumpy journey into the physiology of humans in fire conditions and in personal protective equipment (PPE). It is astonishing, that the stress on the body of the firefighter may be as great from the fire as from their own heat generation due to work being done. If you think about it - it is obvious. PPE protects the heat transfer...both ways! You won't heat up, but you cannot really cool down either. 

This is something that every firefighter knows (feels), but why we - fire engineers should think about that? When we design a building, we design it for firefighter accessibility. We provide them with tools to reach the place of fire and begin efficient extinguishing actions. But what if just getting to the place where the fire is, is so physically exhausting, that efficient actions are unlikely to be carried out? Do we ever think that when we design a risky environment on the 30th floor or 5 floors below the ground? Or when our landscrapers have such vast walking distances, that mistaking an entrance may be an error that costs you dozens of minutes? Boy was I uneducated in this regard, and I am really thankful to Denisse and Gavin for teaching me some really important lessons they have learnt through decades of experiments in this field.

If you would like to learn more, you should check out the websites of their respective institutions, as they are filled with great resources on this subject:

• University of Illinois Fire Service Institute
• UL Fire Safety Research Institute
• UL Fire Safety Research Institute Academy

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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.

Do we need another fire handbook? If so, what handbook would that be? I guess a question like this must have gone through Brian Meachams' mind when he got the idea for a handbook of fire and environment. And he got a brilliant co-editor - Margaret McNamee to support him in this tough work. The effect - a complete piece on the environmental effects of fires - but beyond just smoke and contamination. A piece that deals with the complexities of the modern world, sustainability and resilience. One that considers product lifecycle assessment as much as the toxicity of its combustion products. A holistic view gives us fire engineers a different lens to view our work through.

In this episode, I interview Brian and Margaret on why this handbook came to life.  That why is probably the most important question to be asked. If there was no reason, why go through all this effort to structurize and condense the knowledge we have so far amassed? If why does not exist, why would anyone go through the hassle of considering one more (difficult) thing in their project?

Well, I hope I won't spoil the episode, but the why exists. And it is a pretty good one. And to learn it, you have to dig into this episode!

You can find the handbook here:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-94356-1#about-this-book

It is behind a paywall, but many universities and institutes should have free access!

The publisher describes this handbook as:
The fundamental purpose of this handbook is to raise awareness about the environmental impacts of fire and fire suppression, primarily within the fire engineering and firefighting communities, but also within the environmental engineering and planning disciplines. The Handbook provides readers with a fundamental understanding of the problem and its magnitude and includes a set of tools and methods for assessing environmental, social and financial impacts, and a set of tools for identifying and selecting appropriate mitigation options.

• Presents previously unavailable material on identification, assessment and mitigation of environmental fires
• Facilitates readers with knowledge in one area to focus on topics where they lack expertise
• Extensively cites detailed studies and reports to support in-depth study in each of the topic areas

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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.

It does not matter if you hate or love BIM, does not matter if you use it daily or have no idea what it is... Building Information Modelling will be an important part of our engineering future and we better get used to it.  In this episode, I talk to Peter Thompson of GHD, who had previously worked at Autodesk as a Revit developer, and prof. Ruggiero Lovreglio, a teacher of computer methods in design at Massey University. Having two experts - one a developer, and the other a user of BIM I try to get balanced answers on what BIM means for Fire Safety Engineering and how will it impact our future. And I must say I am surprised by the answers - I was pretty sure we will spend an hour talking about issues with transferring the models, but after this talk, this whole BIM environment seems like a pretty good idea!

I hope you will also enjoy this journey through the near and a bit future of BIM technology. Looking forward to hear back from you about your BIM journeys, thoughts and ideas on how make this the technology of the future FSE.

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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 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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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.

[March 2023 update] The Thesis PDF is finally available! Check it here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369141515_Fire_risk_associated_with_photovoltaic_installations_on_flat_roof_constructions_-_Experimental_analysis_of_fire_spread_in_semi-enclosures

If a PV panel is fire safe, and the roof is fire safe, what is the outcome of a panel placed on the roof? Not a great surprise that merging two things that meet their requirements within their respectable eco-systems gives a not such a fire-safe outcome after all... This is the difference between considering systems versus product characteristics, and in relation to the fire safety of PV panels, something truly unique to my today's guest - dr Jens Steemann Kristensen.

Jens has gone a long way from burning PV panels in a cone calorimeter to trying to understand the holistic behaviour of panels placed on the roof. Join me in learning about his journey, his doubts and findings, and most importantly - some really interesting findings in how the issue of fire-safe PV roofs can be solved.

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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.