Fire Science Show

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...

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...