Fire Science Show

ASET/RSET is the fire safety engineering idea that sounds almost too clean to argue with: the building must give you more time to escape than you need to get out. But once you try to prove it in a real project, the simplicity could and and the hard questions start. Where does “time zero” actually begin: ignition, detection, or alarm? What does it mean for tenability to fail i...

In this episode I take you into practicality of introducing wind into fire safety engineering considerations, and focus on it's implementation as a part of fire oriented CFD analyses. In here, we dig into why wind is tied to so many catastrophic fires, why firefighter safety is often shaped by sudden wind shifts, and why designing for calm air can quietly turn fire safety int...

Smoke does not just slow people down, it changes what they believe is even possible. That simple idea is why we get so excited about pyFDS-Evac, an open source workflow that connects Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) results directly to modern evacuation modeling with JuPedSim. When the fire environment can remove an exit from view, reduce walking speed through extinction and soo...

A tool doesn’t become a global workhorse because it’s clever. It becomes a workhorse when different labs can run it, calibrate it, compare it, and trust it. It is a very long road from the invention to widespread use. And I got the chance to discuss the path of how the Cone took off with Dr. Marc Janssens, who is a key figure in this story - he was even jointly co-awarded the...