Fire Science Show

Wildland-Urban Interface fires are a class of fires that deserves own models, own studies and a lot of research focus. This is what I discuss today with prof. Arnaud Trouvé from the University of Maryland, shortly before he has given his plenary talk at the recent Combustion Symposium in Kyoto. In this interview, Arnaud explains what makes wildland urban interface (WUI) fires...

In todays episode of fire fundamentals we talk with Professor Elizabeth Weckman from University of Waterloo about advanced optical diagnostics that let fire researchers read temperature, chemistry, soot, and velocity from light without relying only on probes. We break down what cameras, infrared imaging, spectroscopy, lasers, and PIV can reveal, plus the calibration and inter...

The cone calorimeter sits in thousands of labs, shaping what we know about flammability, smoke production, and heat release rate. This essential piece of equipment comes with quite a story of how it was engineered or why its “obvious” design choices were anything but obvious. We wanted that history from the source, so we invited Professor Vyto Babrauskas to walk us through th...

A carbon budget can feel like a hard wall in modern building design, and once you treat CO2 as currency, everything starts competing for a slice of it. The problem is that fire safety systems often show up in those spreadsheets only as a penalty: extra embodied carbon for sprinklers, alarms, and protection. What gets ignored is the payoff. A serious fire can erase years of “s...