Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show is connecting fire researchers and practitioners with a society of fire engineers, firefighters, architects, designers and all others, who are genuinely interested in creating a fire-safe future. Through interviews with a diverse group of experts, we present the history of our field as well as the most novel advancements. We hope the Fire Science Show becomes your weekly source of fire science knowledge and entertainment. Produced in partnership with the Diamond Sponsor of the show - OFR Consultants
Episodes
245 episodes
236 - Fitting an efficient smoke control system in a confined space
A tight, historic cellar. Arched ceilings. Long corridors. Tiny shafts. We faced a design wall: to keep routes tenable, we needed twice the extraction that the building could carry. At that point, I've failed as an engineer - I've reached my li...
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50:59
235 - A Repeating Tragedy with Lazaros Filippidis
A fire in a public venue happened again. No, I am not talking about the one in Switzerland. Since the tragic New Year celebration, we had one more near-miss in Madrid on Jan 10th 2026... In fact, who knows how many we actually had? It is a trag...
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1:08:43
234 - Building a fire safety culture with George Boustras
Today we sit down with safety science leader George Boustras - a professor at European University Cyprus, UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Societal Safety in South East Mediterranean and founder of Centre of Excellence in Risk & ...
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59:33
233 - Safety as a moving target with Danielle Antonelis
Fires in informal settlements and humanitarian settings rarely make headlines, but they define daily life for millions. We sit down with Kindling founder Danielle Antonelis to trace a four-year arc from the non-profits early days and ideas to g...
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57:16
232 - 2025 Wrap up episode - How fires turn into catastrophies
Catastrophes don’t happen because of one bad decision; they happen when many small assumptions fail at the same time. I take this opportunity to talk about my thoughts related to the Wang Fuk Court fire in Hong Kong. I attempt to examine how a ...
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52:41
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Merry Christmas everyone!
I would like to take this opportunity to wish you Merry Christmas, a great time with your families, a bit of rest and time to reflect, and an awesome 2026 to come!If you are desperate for fire science on Christmas Eve, check out the OFR ...
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4:21
231 - BESS explosion prevention and mitigation with Lorenz Boeck and Nick Bartlett
Today we cover another branch of safety of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), that is explosion prevention in mitigation. I always thought you can either end with a fire or with an explosion, and boy I was wrong... but we will go back to th...
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59:50
230 - Wind driven conflagration experiments with Faraz Hedayati
A facility with 105 synchronized fans pushing hurricane-class wind across a full-size house while a live fire... This is not science fiction - this is a real research capacity that helps us re-shape our knowledge on the full scale building igni...
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51:35
229 - Learning from 900 fires with Björn Maiworm
What can you learn after processing observations across 900 severe fires? A lot. Actually, I will send you to the paper straight away:Evaluating 900 Potentially Harmi...
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1:01:15
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228 - Quantifying the expected utility of fire tests with Andrea Franchini
What do you expect from running a fire test? I would hope that it improves my state of knowledge. But do they do this? We often pursue them blindly, but it seems there is a way to do this in an informed way. In this episode we explo...
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53:21
227 - The differences between EV and ICEV fires in car parks
A viral clip of an EV igniting was what started my worries about safety in car parks I have been designing. Are we ready for fast growing fires? Since 2019 I've learned and studied a lot, I've relaxed on some aspects of it and was able to ident...
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54:47
226 - New Swiss fire safety code with Gianluca De Sanctis and Sofia Kourgiantaki
It is a massive effort to rewrite a national fire safety code around measurable risk, explicit targets, and cost-effectiveness. But sometimes, there are great reasons to do so. In this episode, together with Gianluca De Sanctis and Sofia Kourgi...
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1:02:24
225 - Battery Energy Storage Systems with Noah Ryder
Demand for the energy storage is as high as ever, and is about to triple-quadruple. The development of technology is at unprecedented phase, and even within a single project you may face different cell, battery or container generations. This pa...
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52:10
224 - Navigating the complexities to change our field - a roundtable with Steve McGuirk and Brian Meacham
This week, in the Fire Science Show, we host a roundtable discussion on complexities in fire safety science and engineering.Most safety failures don’t come from a single mistake—they emerge when people, technology, and institutions misal...
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1:07:38
223 - Heat-induced delamination in CLT with Antonela Čolić
In this episode of the Fire Science Show we invite dr. Antonela Čolić from the OFR Consultants, to break down the performance of adhesives used in CLT in fire, what differences between the glues are observable at the microscale and how th...
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59:07
222 - Integrating WUI risk management and fire safety engineering with Pascale Vacca
In this episode we try to demonstrate another step in integrating fire engineering into WUI risk management, and vice versa. These two areas together form some sort of fire engineering method, which I strongly believe will be an important part ...
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1:11:33
221 - Fire experiments at the ISS (SoFIE-MIST) with Michael Gollner
Fire doesn’t play by Earth’s rules once you leave gravity behind. In this deep dive with Professor Michael Gollner, we unpack what the recent experiments at the ISS called SoFIE-MIST taught us about solid fuel flammability in microgravity—how t...
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1:02:59
220 - Test vs experiment with David Morrisset
In this episode we dive into the ap between standardized tests and experiments, trying to figure out (a) is there a difference and (b) if there is, could not understanding the difference quietly erode safety. With guest David Morrisset (Queensl...
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1:00:36
219 - Giving back with the SFPE Foundation - with Leslie Marshall
In this episode, we give focus to the SFPE Foundation – a catalyst transforming how fire engineering research is funded, conducted, and shared globally. In this conversation with Leslie Marshall, Interim Executive Director of the SFPE Foundatio...
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58:20
218 - Fire decay and cooling phases with Andrea Lucherini
What happens when the flames die down? It's a question rarely addressed in fire engineering, yet the decay and cooling phases of fires can be more dangerous than peak fire conditions. In this deep-dive conversation with Dr. Andrea Lucherini fro...
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58:45
217 - Things that go wrong with the smoke control and how we fix them
In my personal view, an alarming truth about building fire safety lies in the gap between what's designed and what actually works in a building. After conducting 1000+ hot smoke tests in 200+ buildings, my experience is that most (maybe even 90...
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55:30
216 - What do we measure and how? with David Morrisset
What happens when we stick a thermocouple into a fire? The answer is surprisingly complex and has profound implications for fire safety engineering. In this deep-dive episode, Dr. David Morrisset from Queensland University joins Wojciech to unr...
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1:04:14
215 - Lessons from the 2018 Camp Fire with Eric D. Link
The devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California serves as a haunting reminder of how rapidly wildfires can overwhelm communities. We have not known anything like it - the flames raced through Paradise at four miles per hour, 30,000 resid...
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57:13
214 - Thermal Imagers with Martin Veit
The world looks entirely different through a thermal camera lens, especially in a fire scenario. These devices reveal harsh temperature gradients between hot and cold surfaces, adding another dimension to how fire safety professionals understan...
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56:51
213 - Setting up your own chatbot with Ruggiero Lovreglio and Amir Rafe
The AI revolution has arrived, but fire safety engineers face a critical dilemma: how to leverage powerful AI tools while protecting confidential project data. Professor Ruggiero Rino Lovreglio from Massey University and Dr. Amir Ra...
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1:02:19
