Typical activities of fire/life safety consultants include determining how building fire safety is affected by fire protection and life safety systems such as sprinklers, smoke control systems, and roof vents; determining activation times of fire detection systems such as smoke detectors and sprinklers; assessing how different materials or products would contribute to fire development; and determining when a building would become untenable due to smoke or heat (ASET/RSET analysis). Reax Engineering Inc.'s fire and life safety consultants include Chris Lautenberger and David Rich
Chris Lautenberger, PhD, PE 
Chris Lautenberger received an MS in Fire Protection Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester, Massachusetts) with a thesis related to fire modeling, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (major area: Combustion) from the University of California at Berkeley with a dissertation related to materials' flammability and fire modeling. Dr. Lautenberger is a licensed California Fire Protection Engineer (Professional Engineer, PE). Between 2000 and 2008, Dr. Lautenberger worked as a fire and life safety consultant at Code Consultants, Inc. (St. Louis, Missouri) and Arup Fire (San Francisco, California) where he became experienced in code consulting and performance-based fire design. Since joining Reax Engineering in 2008, Dr. Lautenberger has continued to gain experience as a fire and life safety consultant, working on projects ranging from atrium smoke control to design of clean agent fire suppression systems.
Dr. Lautenberger is one of the most experienced fire and life safety consultants in the area of fire modeling and its application to design of buildings. He is skilled at applying fire modeling in a fire protection consulting context, particularly in support of performance based fire design of buildings. Dr. Lautenberger is also one of the most experienced fire consultants in the area of fire growth modeling, the prediction of how fires would spread under different conditions using small-scale fire test data as input.
David Rich, PhD
David Rich received his MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering (major area: combustion) from the University of California at Berkeley, with a NASA sponsored dissertation related to materials flammability testing. Before joining Reax Engineering, Dr. Rich worked as a fire and life safety consultant at Arup Fire in San Francisco, California. His fire consulting experience spans building and fire code consulting; disaster planning for large municipalities; design of mechanical smoke control systems and natural ventilation smoke control systems; development of code equivalencies; and egress analysis and modeling. In addition to working as a fire protection consultant, Dr. Rich is currently an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University (California) where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Fluid Mechanics, Combustion, Fire Dynamics, and Internal Combustion Engines. Dr. Rich is a skilled laboratory experimentalist, making him one of the few fire and life safety consultants with experience covering laboratory testing, code consulting, and fire modeling.
Fire consultants vs. Code consultants
Building designers or owners sometimes hire both "fire consultants" and "code consultants". The idea is that fire consultants handle primarily "technical" issues such as fire and egress modeling, performance-based design calculations, etc., while code consultants handle primarily issues related to the prescriptive building and fire codes. This splitting of responsibilities between "fire consultants" and "code consultants" generally leads to higher project costs than hiring a single consultant that can handle both "fire consulting" and "code consulting". In fact, the best fire safety consultants can do both. Reax Engineering fire consultants believe that these two areas are interrelated, and that "code" issues should not be pursued blindly without understanding the relevant fire dynamics, and that "technical" issues such as fire modeling must be carefully approached by first understanding all relevant regulatory and code issues.
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