From the SFPE Performance Based Design Conference in Singapore, we sit down with Jonathan Hodges and Mark McKinnon (UL Research Institutes) and Christian Rippe (Jensen Hughes) moments after their case study presentation to break down a modern parking garage fire engineering workflow with a huge does of performance based and probabilistic approaches.

We talk about what changes when today’s vehicle fleet makes multi-vehicle fire spread more plausible, and why picking a single car fire curve can quietly bake bias into an entire performance-based design. The team shares how they use real incident data, vehicle size distributions, ignition location categories, and percentile-based heat release rate curves to build design fires that are transparent and defensible. We also dig into EV charging as an initiating mode, what the data can and cannot support, and how a “gap analysis” mindset helps practitioners avoid false precision.

Then we get into the risk machinery: scenario binning, frequencies, sprinkler reliability assumptions, and how CFD (FDS) fits when you cannot simulate 100,000 possibilities. Finally, we go structural with concrete spalling, thermal finite element modeling in Abaqus, and a scripted workflow that iteratively removes damaged concrete to understand how exposure evolves during long-duration multi-vehicle fires.

For this episode, there is a ton of resources. From Jonathan:

1. Reference for first design fire paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2024.104145
2. Reference for second design fire paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2026.104721
3. Reference for database paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-025-01701-5
4. Reference for number of parking garages: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2022.103565
5. Reference for ULRI vehicle fire data: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2026.112471
6. Reference for ULRI material database: https://materials.fsri.org/
7. Reference for NERIS: http://neris.fsri.org/
8. Reference for NFPA Vehicles data: https://www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/research/nfpa-research/fire-statistical-reports/vehicle-fires

And two from myself:

1. Outcomes of the massive fire with spalling in Warsaw https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2025.104352
2. Open sided car park report by OFR https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fire-safety-open-sided-car-parks/real-fires-open-sided-car-park-fire-resistance-introduction-and-conclusion

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