Fire Protection of Weapon Storage and Water Mist Redundancy Philosophies

Abstract

The FiST-project New Technologies for Fire Suppression On Board Naval Craft, is a tri-lateral research project under the Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden Cooperative Science and Technology MOU. The focus for the project is active firefighting on navy ships, with a special emphasis on how firefighting systems might perform in a damaged condition. The results of a number of full scale fire tests run at SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden, December 2011-February 2012 are reported. The testing had two objectives. The first was to investigate redundancy solutions for fire suppression systems. To this end, the performance of a low pressure water mist system with reduced capacity and the performance of a redundant extinguishment system attached to a strength bulkhead were investigated. The results of the tests indicated that a low pressure system designed to handle a well-ventilated hydrocarbon fire scenario can suppress the same fire in a less ventilated space with a 50 % reduction in water supply. Further if the system is fed by pumps providing water at lower pressure e.g. the fire main, it still has the capacity to suppress a compartment fire. Testing of the bulkhead mounted system indicated that it could extinguish an obstructed diesel pool fire at water flow rates of 12-14 L/m2/min provided nozzles that distributed the water spray over the entire test space were used. The second objective was to study the relevance of the weapon storage fire protection water delivery requirements found in Naval Ship Code (NSC) (24 mm/min) or Class DNV (32 mm/min) regulations. For the fire scenario studied, the results indicated that lower water flow rates were successful in keeping the temperature of a dummy torpedo below a critical temperature.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 2012
Accession Number
AD1000055

Entities

People

  • Johan Lindstrom
  • Michael Rahm

Organizations

  • SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Bulkheads
  • Classification
  • Contracts
  • Critical Temperature
  • Fire Fighting
  • Fire Protection
  • Fire Suppression
  • Fires
  • Flow
  • Flow Rate
  • Hydrocarbons
  • Redundancy
  • Regulations
  • Security
  • Water Flow
  • Water Supplies
  • Weapons

Readers

  • Fire Suppression Systems Design.
  • Software Engineering

Technology Areas

  • Space
  • Space - Hall-Effect Thruster