Fire Safety Technology Research Articles

Gelatin-based ionic hydrogel for intelligent fire-alarm system with considerable toughness, flame retardancy, and thermoelectric performance

Temperature-responsive materials with excellent reliability, sensitivity, and flame-retardant properties have always been an urgent need in the field of intelligent fire protection. In this discourse, we introduce a novel thermosensitive ionic hydrogel coating (gelatin/poly(acrylamide-co-acrylic acid)/CaCl2/spindle-shaped aluminum hydroxide nanosheet/glycerol, HCA) synthesized via free radical polymerization. HCA not only demonstrates considerable mechanical properties with a fracture strain of up to 842.5 % and a maximum tensile strength of 0.77 MPa but also exhibits notable flame retardancy and adhesion. It effectively covers combustible surfaces, providing outstanding fire protection. Notably, HCA boasts a Seebeck coefficient of up to 10.1 mV/K, significantly surpassing conventional thermoelectric materials. The well-established linear relationship between the generated voltage and temperature variation enables HCA-based intelligent fire-alarm system to accurately emit continuous alerts during fire incidents and swiftly transmit alarm signals to terminal devices. The development of this intelligent fire-alarm system presents new avenues in intelligent fire-safety technologies.

Advancements in Fire Safety Technology: A Automatic Fire Extinguishing Robot

Fire security which is a lasting and persistent issue requires the continuous development of technology to reinforce protection and inhibition of the fires which are regular event that often leads to emergencies in many sectors. This research endeavors to delve deeply into the realm of fire safety technology, focusing keenly on two innovative approaches: the Chai roof closers security policy, after house-closers protection process, and a matted fire extinguisher robot that notifies about the fire. Through scrupulously examining their technical detail, experiments, operational patterns, and potential outcomes and impact, the paper in this order to fulfills its objective of giving the reader a comprehensive and all-encompassing understanding of the extent and the take of these types of fire systems in the total field of fire safety. Relying on a broad review of journal articles, experiments, and also a proactive approach to these technological advancements that might contribute to averting fire disasters and on preserving both human lives and valuable properties, this research undertakes a mission to explore the emergence of these technological advancements and how much they instill change in the conduct of disaster response and risk mitigation.

Investigating the efficacy of expanded graphite/NaCl composite powder as an extinguishing agent for metal combustion suppression

Advancements in fire safety technology have led to the development of expanded graphite (EG)/NaCl composite powder, a dry powder fire extinguishing agent specifically for metal fires. This study used custom apparatus to examine the fire suppression properties of this composite powder in relation to its constituent elements, EG and NaCl. Compared to pure EG, this composite powder has a smaller particle size and better thermal stability. The flames of a sodium metal fire were effectively suppressed using only 8 g of the EG/NaCl composite powder. The powder suppressed the flames within 22 s. This performance surpassed that of the use of EG or NaCl alone. Moreover, after the fire was extinguished, the temperature decreased at a rate of 1.23 °C/s within the temperature range of 350–250 °C. This rate was 15.44% and 44.78% faster than those of EG and NaCl, respectively. The suppressive effects of the EG/NaCl composite powder are primarily attributed to heat absorption—which prevents contact between combustible metals and air—and the adsorption of depleting H∙ and OH∙ radicals. These results indicate that EG/NaCl composite powder has promising firefighting applications, particularly in fires involving the burning of metals.

Automatic Recognition of Indoor Fire and Combustible Material with Material-Auxiliary Fire Dataset

Early and timely fire detection within enclosed spaces notably diminishes the response time for emergency aid. Previous methods have mostly focused on singularly detecting either fire or combustible materials, rarely integrating both aspects, leading to a lack of a comprehensive understanding of indoor fire scenarios. Moreover, traditional fire load assessment methods such as empirical formula-based assessment are time-consuming and face challenges in diverse scenarios. In this paper, we collected a novel dataset of fire and materials, the Material-Auxiliary Fire Dataset (MAFD), and combined this dataset with deep learning to achieve both fire and material recognition and segmentation in the indoor scene. A sophisticated deep learning model, Dual Attention Network (DANet), was specifically designed for image semantic segmentation to recognize fire and combustible material. The experimental analysis of our MAFD database demonstrated that our approach achieved an accuracy of 84.26% and outperformed the prevalent methods (e.g., PSPNet, CCNet, FCN, ISANet, OCRNet), making a significant contribution to fire safety technology and enhancing the capacity to identify potential hazards indoors.

Guiding Evacuees to Improve Fire Building Evacuation Efficiency: Hazard and Congestion Models to Support Decision Making by a Context-Aware Recommender System

Fires in large buildings can have tragic consequences, including the loss of human lives. Despite the advancements in building construction and fire safety technologies, the unpredictable nature of fires, particularly in large buildings, remains an enormous challenge. Acknowledging the paramount importance of prioritising human safety, the academic community has been focusing consistently on enhancing the efficiency of building evacuation. While previous studies have integrated evacuation simulation models, aiding in aspects such as the design of evacuation routes and emergency signalling, modelling human behaviour during a fire emergency remains challenging due to cognitive complexities. Moreover, behavioural differences from country to country add another layer of complexity, hindering the creation of a universal behaviour model. Instead of centring on modelling the occupant behaviour, this paper proposes an innovative approach aimed at enhancing the occupants’ behaviour predictability by providing real-time information to the occupants regarding the most suitable evacuation routes. The proposed models use a building’s environmental conditions to generate contextual information, aiding in developing solutions to make the occupants’ behaviour more predictable by providing them with real-time information on the most appropriate and efficient evacuation routes at each moment, guiding the occupants to safety during a fire emergency. The models were incorporated into a context-aware recommender system for testing purposes. The simulation results indicate that such a system, coupled with hazard and congestion models, positively influences the occupants’ behaviour, fostering faster adaptation to the environmental conditions and ultimately enhancing the efficiency of building evacuations.

Scientometric Review of Sustainable Fire-Resistant Polysaccharide-Based Composite Aerogels

Fire safety is a critical concern in various industries necessitating the development of sustainable and effective fire-resistant materials. Sustainable fire-resistant polysaccharide-based composite aerogels are regarded as an innovative solution in fire safety applications, and as such, research in this field has increased consistently over the past few years. Despite the plethora of literature on this important subject, only a few studies have attempted to map the global research of sustainable fire-resistant polysaccharide-based composite aerogels to identify the geospatial collaborative network and trend of research. This study utilizes a scientometric review of global trends in sustainable fire-resistant polysaccharide-based composite aerogels research between 2003 and 2023 using VOSviewer and biblioshiny to analyze co-author, co-word, co-citation, clusters, and geospatial maps. A total of 234 bibliographic records from the Scopus database were analyzed to generate the study’s research power networks and geospatial map. The most significant contributions in sustainable fire-resistant polysaccharide-based composite aerogels come from China, the United States, Australia, Canada, and India with records of 194, 20, 11, 9, and 8, respectively. The top five sources for articles in this area of research include ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, Chemical Engineering Journal, Composite Engineering, ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, and Carbohydrate Polymers. The application of sustainable fire-resistant polysaccharide-based composite aerogels spans the engineering and construction fields. The versatility in the fabrication and customization allows for seamless integration into diverse applications. The article concludes by emphasizing the significance of sustainable fire-resistant polysaccharide-based composite aerogels as a promising advancement in fire safety technology, combining sustainability, fire resistance, versatility, and mechanical strength to address critical challenges in the field. This review provides important insight into the research challenges, trends, and patterns of sustainable fire-resistant polysaccharide-based composite aerogel research worldwide.

Research on fire source location and early warning algorithm based on sensor network

In the construction and development of modern society, the form of urban buildings presents the characteristics of diversification, although different types of building structure for social residents' life and production has brought convenient conditions, but also caused more safety risks, the building internal fire safety technology requirements are increasingly high. In this context, the traditional fire detection technology has been unable to meet the needs of building fire prevention, so scholars from various countries in the practice of exploration, integrated the use of network technology and intelligent algorithm to build an automatic fire alarm system, which can accurately detect and effectively control the fire in the early stage, can truly realize the prevention oriented development requirements. In this paper, based on the research status of building fire source location early warning technology in the new era, according to the basic principle of wireless sensor network system and fire location DV-hop algorithm, based on the multi-sensor data fusion technology to create a fire source early warning system. The final experimental results show that this algorithm can ensure the accuracy of fire warning positioning and improve the scientific and accurate decision making of the system.

Active Utilization and Time Reduction of Connection Pipeline Facilities in Fire Sites

This study examined a method of confirming the location of connection water pipe facilities installed in buildings in a short time. The study aimed to help solve failure to supply firefighters with fire extinguishing water or delays because the location of the fire extinguishing facility’s water supply could not be timely identified. Owing to unclear regulations on the location of the fire-fighting facility’s water outlet installation as prescribed by the Fire Safety Technology, many apartments install it on the side or back of buildings. Given that the fire-fighting facility’s water outlet is not installed in a certain place, firefighters cannot quickly find the location of the fire facility’s water outlet at fire sites, leading to delays in securing fire extinguishing water. A solution is to attach “firefighting facility installation guide signs” to the indoor fire extinguishing tank on the first floor of apartment buildings. Additionally, the fire safety standards shall be stipulated on the installment of indoor signs indicating the fire-fighting facilities. These solutions can address difficulties in finding fire facility’s water outlet at the fire site and resolve delays. Above all, implementing these can ensure the timely supply of fire extinguishing water to firefighters.

A Review of Sociological Issues in Fire Safety Regulation

This paper presents an overview of contemporary sociological issues in fire safety. The most obviously social aspects of fire safety—those that relate to the socioeconomic distribution of fire casualties and damage—are discussed first. The means that society uses to mitigate fire risks through regulation are treated next; focusing on the shift towards fire engineered solutions and the particular challenges this poses for the social distribution and communication of fire safety knowledge and expertise. Finally, the social construction of fire safety knowledge is discussed, raising questions about whether the confidence in the application of this knowledge by the full range of participants in the fire safety design and approvals process is always justified, given the specific assumptions involved in both the production of the knowledge and its extension to applications significantly removed from the original knowledge production; and the requisite competence that is therefore needed to apply this knowledge. The overarching objective is to argue that the fire safety professions ought to be more reflexive and informed about the nature of the knowledge and expertise that they develop and apply, and to suggest that fire safety scientists and engineers ought to actively collaborate with social scientists in research designed to study the way people interact with fire safety technology.

Interactions Between Human Behaviour and Technology: Implications for Fire Safety Science

Here we present a number of studies showing how human behaviour may influence the effectiveness of fire safety equipment. The paper initially focuses on smoke alarms and first reviews studies on the waking effectiveness of smoke alarms, including the increased waking effectiveness of a low frequency 520 Hz square wave. Section 2.2 presents research on the impact of changes in the open or shut status of doors and windows on alarm performance. When all doors were closed, the average alarm volume in other rooms fell to a mere 36 dBA. Time for alarm activation by smoke was very strongly influenced by shutting interconnecting doors. The analysis in Sect. 2.3, using detailed coroner’s files, suggests that for many fire fatalities a smoke alarm is likely to have been irrelevant to whether or not a person died in the fire. Part 3 presents research examining the use of fire extinguishers and fire blankets by older adults. Blanket use was more successful than the fire extinguisher, with 22% of participants unable to remove the fire extinguisher safety tag. We conclude that any new fire safety technologies or developments need to explicitly take into account human factors in their design. Further, consideration must be made about whether a new product is likely to be located, installed, available, maintained and/or appropriately used by the people who are most at risk. The paper closes with a discussion of some preventative strategies.

中国の防火規制に基づく防災計画で達成される避難安全性能の事例研究―上海に計画される事務所建築に関するケーススタディ―

Evacuation safety requirements in China for high rise buildings are reviewed. Evacuation safety of an office building project permitted for construction in Shanghai is then assessed with Japanese performance based fire safety assessment method. The analysis has resulted in general equivalency of the targeted safety level, yet design details show significant conflicts due to the lack of expertise in fire safety technology of the local building authority.

Performance criteria used in fire safety design

In many countries around the world, building codes are shifting from prescriptive- to performance-based for technical, economic, and social reasons. This move is made possible by progress in fire safety technologies, including the development of engineering tools that are required to implement performance codes. The development of performance-based codes follows a transparent, hierarchical structure in which there are usually three levels of objectives. The top level objectives usually state the functional requirements and the lowest level the performance criteria. Usually, one middle level exists, however, more levels can be used in this hierarchical structure depending on the complexity of the requirements. The success of performance-based codes depends on the ability to establish performance criteria that will be verifiable and enforceable. The performance criteria should be such that designers can easily demonstrate, using engineering tools, that their designs meet them and that the code authority can enforce them. This paper presents the performance criteria that are currently used by fire protection engineers in designing fire safety systems in buildings. These include deterministic and probabilistic design criteria as well as safety factors. The deterministic criteria relate mainly to life safety levels, fire growth and spread levels, fire exposure and structural performance. The probabilistic criteria focus on the incident severity and incident likelihood. Finally, the inclusion of safety factors permits a conservative design and allows for a smaller margin of error due to uncertainty in the models and the input data.

The role of intumescents for construction products with improved fire safety

AbstractUsing a brief review of the history of fire safety technology, the author outlines the development of intumescents and their effect under fire conditions, in particular discussing silicate‐based materials. Finally a classification system based on the height of the foam and the foam pressure developed under fire exposure along with the operational stresses to which the intumescent may be subjected is put forward. It is suggested that this kind of classification needs to be taken into account in the development of guidelines for European Technical Approvals.