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 limit and could not find a solution.

Some time later, a solution appeared in my head from nowhere —what if the fan changed with the fire? Not in a crude on-off way, but by tracking temperature, exploiting density changes, and chasing constant mass flow instead of fixed volume.

We unpack the moment this clicked, the fan physics behind it, and why hotter smoke can actually make extraction easier if you use the margin correctly. You’ll hear how we oversized the fan, ran it at a lower frequency in ambient, then ramped as temperatures rose to keep kilograms per second steady. That adaptive control boosted cubic meters per second right when the layer needed support, eased plug-hole entrainment, and stabilised makeup air velocities. We walk through the thermodynamics, the electrical and pressure implications, and how these pieces form a practical control strategy for retrofits and new builds.

To ground the idea, we share two paths to proof. First, CFD with user-defined control that reads gas temperature each time step and updates fan frequency with smoothed delays to prevent oscillations—capturing the real feedback loop between fire and system. Then, full-scale container burns with live control showed the same trends from 20 to over 500 degrees: falling duct pressures, lower fan power at heat, and the headroom to increase volumetric extraction without breaking limits.

Thinking about it now, this idea is a part of many other concepts that I describe together. To show a way how we come from the simple framework—Smoke Control 1.0 (empirical, static), 2.0 (CFD-informed, still static), into a new smoke control 3.0 (adaptive, feedback-driven)—and explore how this thinking can reshape underground venues, car parks, tunnels, pressurisation, and natural ventilation.

If you care about safer evacuation, smaller shafts, lower velocities, and systems that work with physics rather than against it, this story is for you. Subscribe, share with a colleague who designs smoke control, and leave a review with your toughest question so we can tackle it next.

Reading material:

- Can smoke control become smart?

- Transient characteristic of the flow of heat and mass in a fire as the basis for an optimised solution for smoke exhaust

- Smart Smoke Control as an Efficient Solution for Smoke Ventilation in Converted Cellars of Historic Buildings

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 tragedy that feels like it is playing on repeat...

In this podcast episode, we try to dig into why nightclub fires follow the same script decade after decade—what are the parts of the pattern, and what can we do through smarter design, honest modelling, and real enforcement. With guest Lazaros Filippidis from the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich, we map the chain of failure: combustible acoustic treatments under low ceilings, narrow or locked exits, stair “chimneys” that pull smoke toward escaping crowds, and furniture layouts that turn doors into traps.

We talk about human behaviour. People head for the entrance they know. They hesitate when cues conflict—especially if pyrotechnics were part of the show minutes earlier. Phones come out. People respond in such a way not because people are foolish, but because recognition takes time in loud, dark, crowded spaces. The fix isn’t shaming; it’s designing for how people really act: outward‑opening doors, multiple distributed exits, better signage, immediate lights up and music down, and staff who redirect flow on instinct.

For engineers, we go beyond textbook ASET vs RSET and show how coupled fire–evacuation modeling reveals the true picture as heat, irritants, and visibility degrade movement and decision‑making. We make the case for sensitivity analyses: add more patrons, block an exit, switch to ultra‑fast fire growth, drop a service trolley into a corridor, and see in what scenarios your modelling results collapse. We can find the bottlenecks, and if we do, we can fix them. With practical tools—from zone models to agent‑based simulators—you can find vulnerabilities before opening night and recommend changes that add crucial minutes or even seconds.

It was a tough episode to record, especially since there is not much new we have learnt about human behaviour or fire growth in such facilities... I hope this provides some food for thought and fuels future design considerations.

If you are interested in modelling done with buildingExodus, for which Lazaros is one of the developers, please go and visit the FSEG website.

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

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 & Decision Sciences (CERIDES). With George we try to examine fire engineering from the wider safety lens, exploring why culture—not just compliance—decides outcomes.

We unpack a practical definition of safety as managed risk and follow the hard-earned lessons from Bradford City, King’s Cross, and Piper Alpha to today’s performance-based thinking. George explains why engineering effort should focus where complexity and uncertainty truly demand it, and why modeling without common sense leads to false confidence. We dive into real-world behavior in tunnels, the gap between ASET/RSET and what people do under stress, and how a strong safety culture aligns design, operations, and maintenance across a building’s life.

The conversation tackles urgent risks that don’t fit old patterns: lithium-ion battery fires in dense urban housing, micromobility charging in corridors, and emerging wildfire exposure in regions with little prior experience. We outline what works—education that starts early and persists, firm rules with clear roles for citizens, measurable campaigns, and system-level discipline. Borrowing from occupational safety, we highlight safety cases, annual risk assessments, and psychosocial insights that improve decision-making. And we spotlight the “fire scenario” as a powerful, testable playbook for how alarms, fans, dampers, and doors should behave, creating a living matrix for commissioning and maintenance.

If you care about moving beyond checklists to safety that holds up under pressure, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review with your biggest safety culture challenge—we’ll feature the most compelling ideas in a future episode.

Learn more about CERIDES at https://cerides.euc.ac.cy/

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.