Putting smart sprinklers to the test

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Adam Bannister is a contributor to IFSEC Global, having been in the role of Editor from 2014 through to November 2019. Adam also had stints as a journalist at cybersecurity publication, The Daily Swig, and as Managing Editor at Dynamis Online Media Group.
December 7, 2016

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The debate around when and where sprinklers should be installed and if this should be mandated more widely is one of the most contentious in the fire industry.

Approved Document B, which outlines the building regulations in force, only ‘recommends’ that sprinklers are installed in warehouses larger than 20, 000 square metres. Earlier in the year James Dalton, director of general insurance at the Association of British Insurers (ABI), called for mandatory sprinklers in schools and care homes too.

Might the emergence of so-called ‘smart’ sprinklers strengthen the stance of those advocating mandatory sprinklers in schools and warehouses?

The traditional sprinkler that most readers will recognise hasn’t changed in any substantive way – in appearance or function – since Hiram Stevens Maxim (also, ironically, the inventor of something antithetical to ‘life safety’ systems, the machine gun) pioneered the first automatic fire sprinkler system in the late 19th century.

The greater efficiency of modern distribution models has had the undesired consequence of making fire spread more efficiently too. Boxes of often highly flammable materials are now stacked as high as 24 metres in a bid to wring every last bit of value from warehouse square footage.

Tightly packed mountains of stock serve as tinderboxes when a fire is started, so many warehouse owners have turned to sprinklers to minimise losses.

But conventional sprinklers are no panacea for the challenges posed by huge warehouses with tall ceilings, as FM Global reported recently.

“If a fire begins at or near the base of a paper stack, the temperature at the ceiling level may not reach a sufficient temperature to activate until the fire has grown substantially and perhaps extended far beyond its original location,” said the mutual insurance company in the recent article.

“The combination of high storage and potential fire spread, dubbed ‘highly challenging fires’ (HCFs), demands a response that goes beyond the protection recommendations involving traditional sprinklers, notes Christopher Wieczorek, assistant vice president, research group manager for fire and explosion protection at FM Global.”

Researchers from FM Global, which provides loss prevention services to large organisations, considered the fact that sprinklers’s greatest weakness appeared to be inseparable from its greatest strength: “the detection and actuation mechanisms are shared.

“This has yielded remarkably reliable and predictable responses to fire, but it is insufficient when fires are potentially at a great distance from the sprinkler,” the report continued. “Moreover, the distance involved increases the possibility that sprinkler activation might still be insufficient to substantially reduce a conflagration.”

In the age of smart tech, this should apparently now be surmountable, if sprinklers are activated by sensors that are positioned remotely from them.

Such early stage detection has been dubbed simultaneous Monitoring, Assessment and Response Technology – or SMART. This is indeed smart in the internet of things sense – ie, computer chips process inputs from sensors, interpret the data and respond accordingly through a system of discharge devices.

FM Global Research has conducted experiments in their Small Burn Lab with a range of fire sizes and locations.

Yibing Xin, senior lead research scientist at FM Global, found that in a test of a 13 metre-tall roll paper storage, a traditional sprinkler did not activate until flames were at least 15 metres above the floor. “Our SMART system activated when the flames were only 14 feet (4 meters) tall,” he said.

FM Global found that using more than one detector technology – ideally one that detects temperature changes and another, the presence of smoke – was the best way of detecting accurately and responding quickly. It also cut the risk of false alarms and could ‘triangulate’ the precise location of the fire more accurately than a single sensor.

Xin said the tests had “opened up the possibility of using different kinds of sensors or a network of sensors, perhaps one day including infrared and video image-based detection.”

Click here to find out more about FM Global’s findings.

 

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