Fire Science Show

• 207 - Fire Safety of Balconies with Mike Spearpoint and Konstantinos Chotzoglou

  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/s10694-023-01467-8A paper summarising three balcony fire incidents:https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-021-01154-6As more research is published, I will try to keep this up to date.----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.

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• 206 - Fire Engineering Infrastructural Projects with Mukesh Tomar

  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.----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.

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• 205 - FDS maintenance and development with Randy McDermott

  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/fdsRather 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-mcdermottAs 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!----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.

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• 204 - 4th Birthday of the Podcast. Some stories about the past and the future

  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!----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.

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• 203 - The lessons from repeating Jin's experiment on visibility in smoke

  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/2306.16182If 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”. ----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.

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