- Author
-
Jones, W. W.
- Title
- Algorithm for Fast and Reliable Fire Detection.
- Coporate
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
- Book or Conf
- Fire Suppression and Detection Research Application, 8th Annual Symposium. Society of Fire Protection Engineers. Proceedings. January 21-23, 2004,
Orlando, FL,
1-3 p.,
2004
- Keywords
-
fire suppression
|
fire detection
|
fire detection systems
|
algorithms
|
neural networks
|
fire growth
|
false alarms
|
smoke spread
|
detection time
- Abstract
- The purpose of detecting fires early is to provide an alarm when there is an environment which is deemed to be a threat to people or a building. The current generation of fire detection systems is designed to respond to smoke, heat, gaseous emission or electromagnetic radiation generated during smoldering and flaming combustion. Smoke is sensed either by light scattering or changes in conductive properties of the air, heat by thermocouples and thermistors, the electromagnetic spectrum by photodiodes, and gas concentrations by chemical cells. While there is much additional work in progress to use solid-state and electrochemical sensors for oxygen, hydrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide, chlorine, hydrogen sulfide, the full gamut of fire detection is possible utilizing currently available sensor technology. It has been shown that the best combination for early detection has been shown to be the complement of ionization, photoelectric, carbon monoxide and temperature. This paper will demonstrate that low level sensing can achieve the goal of producing early detection using these signals. The example we use is a neural network trained with a model of fire growth and smoke spread. This allows us to reduce the time to detection as well as reduce the error rate for both nuisance alarms as well as missing fires.