Components of a Fire Training System

Typical components that go into the design of a fire training system are:

Fire Simulator Burner

The Process Combustion Fire Simulator (FS) Burner was specifically developed to provide a controllable, clean fire for fire fighting training units (FFTUs). The primary requirements for the burner are:

• It should give the typical 'yellow' flame pattern of a carbonaceous fire
• It should be controllable with regard to flame growth and flame height
• It should be configurable with regard to flame spread and overall heat release
• It should be instantaneously extinguished in the event of a safety violation
• It should not be extinguished by the fire fighting trainees, whatever extinguishant is applied.
• It should be instantaneously available for re-light to commence a new, possibly different, training scenario after shutdown.

The Process Combustion FS Burner is designed to simulate a fire and to enhance training, without placing the demands on the fire fighting training system that a full fire would require.

The burner is designed for minimum heat release for a given flame height and flame spread to reduce the load on the ventilation system and to minimise the gas burn.

The resulting fire is a controllable, simulated fire, not a full 'macho' fire. Training is achieved by the ability to reproduce the scenario and present the trainee with the opportunity to think about and better understand the training aims.

Our experience has shown that the best training results are obtained from effective interaction of the Instructor and the Trainees. This can only be achieved if the Instructors can control the fire as they think best suits the needs of the Trainees.

Typically, the Instructor's hand-held controller allows them to:

• Start the fire
• Stop the fire (Controlled Stop)
• Increase and decrease the flame height
• Create a special effect
• Emergency Shutdown

If the Instructor feels that the Trainees have not broken up the firebase or applied sufficient boundary cooling, the Instructor can command the fire to instantly re-ignite as the burner system remains active until completion of the exercise.

Including smoke in the simulator substantially increases the level of realism. The amount of smoke can range from sufficient to obscure the fireplace to reducing visibility in the simulator to less than 0.5 m.

In the case of the smaller fires, such as waste bins, the smoke nozzles can be built into the fireplace so that the smoke appears to emanate from the fire. For larger fires, the smoke can be injected into the areas surrounding the fire. Thus the whole room can appear to be obscured.

We can provide systems using either oil or water based smoke simulant. Tests carried out at the Fire Research Station (Carrington) confirm that the layering of our oil based smoke takes place at approximately 180°C. An obscuration of 0.5m is achieved with a smoke oil concentration of 1200mg/m3. This concentration is approximately 2% of the Lower Explosive Limit (L.E.L.).

Process Combustion can also provide a cleanup system to remove all smoke and unburnt gases from the exhaust stream.

Controlled heating can be provided for both hot zone entries (>200°C) or for compartment stress heating (~35°C). Process Combustion's involvement in the heating industry means that we can provide a wide range of units from our 'Rapid' range of heaters. These are direct fired air heaters that can be designed to fire on either propane or natural gas.

The advantages of the direct-fired approach are: