Show Notes
A wind-driven ember shower is a key wildfire exposures a building can face, but we have not yet fully understood or accounted for them in making our communities wildfire resilient. Today we sit down with Samuel L. Manzello of Tohoku University and Reax Engineering to unpack how in the last 20 years the firebrand science went from not being able to characterize the features of them well to being able to procur controlled experiments and standardized generators that can actually shape building ...
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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 in a place where nobody is anymore? And are we designing safer buildings, or just winning a seconds-on-a-spreadsheet con...
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 into a coin toss. I walk through what wind actually is from a fire engineering perspective: an atmospheric, turbulent phe...
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 soot exposure, or even incapacitate an agent, you stop “post-processing evacuation” and start modeling decisions that resp...
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 Phillip DiNenno Prize together with dr Vyto Babrauskas, for his efforts on developing, standardizing and promoting the...
A fire scene looks like a puzzle, but it’s a puzzle where the pieces melt, burn, and get hauled away before anyone can measure them. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I sit down with Professor Vincent Brannigan to ask a questions - does a fire investigation truly use the scientific method, or are we doing something else and calling it science? Vincent brings a rare mix of experience as a fire protection engineer, a lawyer who has seen cases up close, and a historian of science who cares deepl...