Wojciech Wegrzynski
280 episodes listed below
Fire safety engineering, explained from first principles.
Fire Science Show is a technical interview program for people who care how fire safety actually gets engineered. Its strongest episodes move from definitions and criteria into the modeling choices, tests, and real-world constraints behind them.
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Fire Science Show is a long-running technical podcast about how fire safety engineering works when it leaves the textbook and enters design, modeling, testing, and public risk. The tone is conversational, but the questions are precise. A typical episode starts with a broad premise and then narrows quickly into definitions, criteria, assumptions, and consequences. Fire resistance becomes a discussion of load-bearing capacity, integrity, insulation, radiation, separating function, cracking, hot gases, testing, and where numerical tools stop being enough. Modeling becomes a practical argument about what counts as a fire in a model and what goes wrong when heat release rate per unit area is treated casually. Evacuation episodes move beyond simple pre-evacuation distributions into routing choices, GPS data, traffic, destinations, social media mining, and the hard problem of representing human decisions. Structural fire engineering appears through tunnel assessment, concrete spalling, exposed reinforcement, thermal analysis, and repair judgment after a fire has caused damage but not collapse. The show also looks sideways to earthquake engineering, asking what fragility functions, uncertainty methods, and community-scale thinking might teach fire science. Explosions are handled as adjacent engineering territory, with attention to pressure rise, ignition, explosion spheres, safety characteristics, and standards. Its public-safety episodes are more grave, especially when discussing low-resource settlements, government failure, and the limits of industry-defined safety. Even the joke episodes reveal the audience: an FDS input file read as ASMR only works for people who know why that is funny. The show’s value is not speed. It is depth. It gives guests room to reason through a method and then presses for the practical meaning. It suits listeners who can handle specialist vocabulary if the payoff is clearer engineering judgment. The emphasis stays on how knowledge becomes usable: in a calculation, a test, a design review, a model, a code clause, or a decision made under uncertainty.
Made for: Built for fire safety engineers, researchers, architects, designers, firefighters, and technically curious listeners who want rigorous discussion rather than simplified safety tips. It especially suits people who work with models, standards, structures, evacuation, or risk assessment.
What sets it apart: The show connects research methods to everyday engineering decisions, often lingering on the criteria and assumptions that other technical podcasts skip. It is unusually strong at translating standards, tests, and models into practical consequences without flattening the complexity.
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
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Fire Science Show connects experimental evidence and engineering models to the difficult decisions behind safer structures and evacuations.
Fire Science Show treats fire as an engineering problem whose assumptions, measurements and human consequences must be made explicit. Expert interviews move between fundamentals and active research, with the host pressing for the practical meaning of each method.
A fire model needs a plausible fire; your inner nitpicker will feel right at home.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical look at what fire resistance criteria measure, and why testing still matters.
Fire resistance comes across here as a practical stand-in for structural fire engineering, and the episode works because it slows a familiar label down into its separate tests.
A grounded look at the choices, routes, and data behind evacuation after people decide to leave.
Large-scale evacuation modeling turns into a human-factors story as soon as people decide to leave. Fire Science Show looks at the stretch between that decision and actual safety, where routes have to contend with traffic, distance, timing, queues, and destinations instead of…
A clear, careful bridge from earthquake fragility functions to neighborhood-scale fire risk.
Fire Science Show makes a productive shift in scale here, using earthquake engineering to think through post-earthquake fires and the broader question of how communities respond when natural hazards cascade.
A grounded look at how tunnel spalling informs repair decisions.
Post-fire tunnel assessment starts with a deceptively simple question: the structure may still be standing, but is it fit to keep using, repair, or treat as unsafe?
A careful fire-modeling discussion that makes the assumptions behind the numbers hard to ignore.
Fire Science Show treats a basic fire-modeling choice as the serious engineering decision it is. The episode follows how a model can carry sophisticated physics and still go wrong when the fire has been defined poorly, then works into heat release rate per unit area: why it…
Manufacturing change, from tools to events.
STEM careers, told through human turning points.
Mining engineering talk with field memory.
Field notes from fluid power engineering.
Wojciech Wegrzynski and colleague Piotr Turkowski of the Fire Science Show break down the letter-by-letter criteria behind fire resistance ratings like REI 60.
Fire Science Show host Wojciech Węgrzyński and RMIT researcher Erika Kuligowski revisit her work on evacuation decision-making, this time focused on what happens after people decide to leave a wildfire.
Fire Science Show host Wojciech Węgrzyński brings together structural engineer Negar Elhami-Khorasani (University at Buffalo) and earthquake engineer Justin Moresco (Applied Technology Council) to ask what wildfire resilience research can borrow from decades of earthquake engineering.
Professor Negar Elhami Khorasani of University at Buffalo, an IFSS Magnusson Award winner, joins host Wojciech Wegrzynski to discuss post-fire structural assessment of tunnels.
In this solo Fire Science Show episode, host Wojciech Węgrzyński walks through how fire safety engineers place a fire inside a model, from simple plume equations to full CFD, and why getting that step wrong invalidates the whole analysis.
In this Fire Fundamentals installment, Fire Science Show host Wojciech Węgrzyński asks WPI professor Ali Rangwala and REMBE chief scientific officer Lorenz Boeck to compress their new WPI explosion-protection master's curriculum into a single episode.
The host discusses a past failure in designing a smoke control system for an underground venue and a later discovery that could have made it work.
Host interviews Danielle Antonellis about Kindling's progress in improving fire safety in low-resource settings globally.
This episode discusses gathering and analyzing fire incident data to improve fire safety engineering, featuring an expert from the Munich Fire Brigade.
An interview with Dr.
This episode discusses the role and future of the SFP Foundation in funding fire protection research and community giving.
The host discusses his recent attendance at a fire science conference and introduces a solo episode on diagnosing and fixing smoke control issues in buildings.
This episode discusses the NIST ESCAPE project's investigation of the 2018 Camp Fire in California, focusing on evacuation insights and lessons learned.
This episode discusses a research project on balcony fire safety, focusing on laminated glass balustrades and the influence of stored items on fire spread.
This episode explores fire engineering for large infrastructure projects like tunnels, nuclear facilities, and airports, featuring expert Dr.