Fire Science Show

This week I've invited a guest, that I was looking to talk to for a good while... Dr Ingo Riess from Riess Ingenieur-GmbH is someone I look up to in the field of tunnel fire safety, in which I am very active in the last few years. In this chat, we had the chance to go through the concept of tunnel resiliency and calculate the risk related to the whole road network, rather than just a tunnel on its own. This is such a refreshing concept, in which the goal - maximizing public safety - is well defined, and thanks to that, smart decisions can be made. And these decisions are not always to make the tunnel a bit safer - in some cases, it may be just better to invest in other safety infrastructure. This holistic view opens new pathways and possibilities and makes investments in fire safety really reasonable. I absolutely love it, and it is something I wish we can implement in my own country.  Outside resilience, we also had a good chance to discuss the ventilation and modelling, design fires and some tough choices the engineers have to make when refurbishing tunnels. If you have anything to do with tunnels, this episode is definitely for you. And if you do not, still can be inspiring, as the world of tunnels is one the forefront of applying risk-based concepts in performance-based engineering. Something, that the rest of the world must eventually catch up.

Make sure to check Ingo's ResearchGate, where he stores all the magnificent reports we have talked about (and many more we did not).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ingo-Riess

Also, give a chance to the Graz  Tunnel Safety and Ventilation conference, which always delivers the best content related to the fire safety of tunnels:
https://www.tunnel-graz.at/

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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 does the future hold? Probably no one knows. But what happens in near future with some of the most popular tools used by the FSE community? That is a great question to a tool developer - Bryan Klein of Thunderhead Engineering, the company that brought us the most popular FDS pre-processor PyroSim and as popular evacuation model Pathfinder.

In this talk, we focus on CFD modelling, and the impact pre-and postprocessing tools had on our capabilities to tackle fire problems with our computers. Mesh resolution and creation techniques. Solver scalability and parallel processing. Most commonly requested tool additions. These are the things you will definitely find in this episode, plus much more!

And do not forget...

 September 12-14, 2022 in Brno, Czech Republic. Fire and Evacuation Modelling Technical Conference. You want to be there!

Keep your eyes on this space: https://www.femtc.com/events/2022

And in the meantime, take a look at the materials from past events at https://www.femtc.com/events/
and give a check to the Thunerhead Engineering!

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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 is the third time we talk about mass timber and fire in this show, and I hope every time the message gets even more refined. In this episode, it is clear - fire resistance is not always enough. But why? You will learn that from dr Daniel Brandon from RISE who spent last years researching timber in fire. In this episode, we discuss the limitations of the fire resistance approach in testing timber structures, and also venture beyond it - how does exposed timber change the fire dynamics in a furnace and how in a real building? How the risk changes once you may have your structure participating in a fire, and why a 2-storey house is pretty safe, while a timber skyscraper brings challenges we have never met before. 

You may also want to view other important timber-in-fire discussions from the Fire Science Show:

• Episode 18 - Engineered timber with Danny Hopkin
• Episode 25 - Structural fire engineering with timber with Felix Weisner

Please check the resources provided by Daniel:

• Exposure from mass timber to facades
• Fire Safe implementation of visible mass timber in tall buildings – compartment fire testing
• Fire Safe Implementation of Mass Timber In Tall Buildings

And also, the most spectacular - see the large timber experiments on your own, to understand what Daniel meant with "the energy must go somewhere" - check this YouTube page

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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.

If you were investigating phenomena and built your whole narrative around a flawed and debunked concept, would that get published? Would that get cited? Would that be recognized? Many of us would say an obvious *no*, but that is not so obvious when we discuss the human behaviour field of science and the concept of panic (the p-word we do not say!). Even though among top evacuation scientists there seems to be a consensus about why this concept is flawed, every year we see more and more papers in which it is an underlining principle of the research...

And it is a symptom of a potentially worse issue. A complete misuse of models, lack of understanding of fundamentals or blind trust in data. All of these take precious time and resources from studies, that are really needed to push our understanding of human behaviour in fire forward.

Today I give the stage to Prof Enrico Ronchi, who has some tough things to say about the state of evacuation modelling in research. I think this message is important and should cause a moment of reflection on what are we doing, and is it the thing we should be doing.

As mentioned in the episode, a great companion to the podcast is the HBiF Webinar on the (mis)use ff controversial terminologies in evac. research with dr Anne Templeton and dr Milad Haghani.  More webinars by HBiF of IAFSS  are available on its Youtube site, and you may watch this space as it fills up with amazing content in near future! Or subscribe here to not miss any new webinar.

The second important resource is the paper Guidance for the Model Developer on Representing Human Behavior in Egress Models by SMV Gwynne, LM Hulse and MJ Kinsey. This paper covers the statements against which evacuation models may be validated.

Finally, make sure you have listened to previous great episodes covering human behaviour in fires and evacuation:

019 - Modelling human behaviour with Erika Kuligowski
016 - The future of evacuation modelling with Enrico Ronchi and Ruggiero Lovreglio
009 - Cognitive biases and decision making with Michael Kinsey

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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 episode I was really happy to host two amazing researchers from UL FSRI - Dr Steve Kerber, the VP of Underwriter Laboratories and Director of UL Fire Safety Research Institute, and Dr Craig Weinschenk, research engineer and a data wizard. Together we venture into the world of fire research carried together with firefighters, with the critical goal of saving firefighter lives and reducing the damage caused by fire. Join us to learn how the largest full-scale fire experiments are performed and what is the recipe to learn the most from them, and share that knowledge in a most efficient manner.

UL FSRI shares tons of useful resources, all that can be found at their website https://fsri.org/ IMHO the most amazing of these resources is the fire investigation page with all the interactive results of large fire experiments. You must check this amazing resource out!

You may also want to check other resources provided by UL FSRI, starting with:

Live stream feed from one of their huge fire experiments
The amazing YouTube channel of UL FSRI
UL FSRI Training courses
and
Github repository with the data from fire experiments

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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.

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 even exist when fire safety is excluded? I think we have learned the hard way that that is not an option. Yet, so often dangerous innovations are introduced without consulting with fire experts. In this episode, we delve into this important and difficult matter with prof. Margaret McNamee of Lund University.

This episode is also an invitation for all Fire Science Show listeners to participate in the Special Issue of the Fire Technology journal: Fire Safety and Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities. Let's take the discussion started in this episode, and exchange the ideas within the fire community on what sustainability means for us, and how can we achieve it. We are looking forward to all of the submissions to this special issue. The deadline is 31st July 2022.

If you would like to connect with Margaret, you can do so through her Twitter and LinkedIn.
You may also want to read up on the  IAFSS Agenda for 2030 which also covers many of the issues related to sustainability discussed in this episode.

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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.

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 important? If we could create an unbiased measure of *importance* of a subject, would they get on top of the list? I'm sure they wouldn't, but I'm pretty sure the subject of today's episode would rank on the very top of that list.

Danielle Antonellis is a founder of a non-profit organization, Kindling, which aims to deliver fire safety to all who do not have access to it. Including societies in low-income countries, people living in informal settlements and socially excluded citizens of the western world.

Kindlings' mission statement is:
"(...) to connect fire safety knowledge with local and global humanitarian and development efforts aimed at reducing the unequal impact of fire on people, property and livelihoods in vulnerable communities around the world."

It is a powerful message and an episode filled with hope and willingness to help others. If you ever wondered how a fire safety engineer could change the world, stop for a while and listen to this conversation.

If you want to learn more about this topic, you can connect with Danielle on her LinkedIn or Twitter and follow Kindling here.

Learn more about the Kindling mission and achievements in this report. 

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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.

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 inconclusive. While to some extent you have to agree with the limitations, in Poland we have found a way how to turn this theatrical tool into a powerhouse of engineering. And this episode is all about this.

I have invited two FSE's - Janusz Paliszek and Piotr Smardz of company INBEPO who are experts in carrying hot smoke tests. Together, we try to debunk the myths around the method and showcase its true strength - the ability to quickly verify the global behaviour of the fire safety automation within the building.

If you are interested more about the hot smoke testing, you can reach Piotr at [email protected] or through his LinkedIn and Janusz at  [email protected] 

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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.

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 things that have happened in the show, and bringing back some of my favourite episodes of the show.
 
Check out the topical collections at the podcast website: https://www.firescienceshow.com/

For the next two weeks, I'm on a break with my family, so the next episode will come up on 12.01.2022!!!

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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.

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 work your way around multiple functional aspects of a system - maintenance, water and power consumption,  drainage capacity, availability of elements and their certification... You would love to focus purely on the fire safety aspect of the issue, but you cannot. Unfortunately, this is often the world of fire engineering. And in this world, we make decisions based on what we know about systems - and when we don't know enough - we test it!

And for the water mist question, I've found the perfect person to give me some answers.  Johny Jessen from VID Fire Kill has visited me in my office and told me about his experience with full-scale fire tests of water mist systems in a tunnel, carried by Efectis. You know he is serious about what he is doing when you learn that the fire source used for this test was approx. 250 MW! This discussion goes deep into the testing and the differences between suppression systems and challenges that modern engineers face in landmark projects.

Johny has asked me to invite you to his LinkedIn profile, where he shares a lot of great resources related to water mist technology - so here you go! And the VID Fire Kill profile.

You may also like to check this whitepaper on the experiments carried in Spain that we discussed in this episode. More materials, including videos of the test, can be found on the project website.

I must also give a shoutout to friends at Efectis who have done some really great job engineering these fire tests! From one fire science enthusiast to another, hats down.

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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.