Imagine a fire suppression system designed to detect, verify and extinguish fires faster than human response. Enter, FlameSmart.
“This is essentially a first responder – a fireman on the wall – that prevents a small incident from becoming a disaster.”
It’s a powerful statement from Nick Boyd, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FlameSmart, as he highlights a core issue facing the waste and resource recovery sector – the speed at which fires can spread.
By the time emergency crews arrive, a small thermal event has often escalated, resulting in millions of dollars in losses and operational downtime.
“Firefighters have told me that by the time they arrive at blazes at waste facilities, it’s already a write-off,” says Nick. “The fire spreads so quickly that even the most dedicated fire brigade effort is often too late.
“First response is critical.”
The FlameSmart system is designed to act exactly as a human firefighter would, but with 24/7, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven response.
“It thinks and acts the same way a firefighter would, which is a new approach based on AI image recognition,” Nick says.
The concept for FlameSmart was born out of a moment of personal urgency during the Black Summer bushfires, which burned across several states in 2019-20.
Nick and his wife were watching the news and seeing countless stories of people being forced to evacuate their properties, their homes unprotected and often lost to the flames.
Having worked at the University of Tasmania setting up an Internet of Things (IoT) course, Nick realised that using sensors to detect fire and an autonomous system to extinguish it was technologically feasible.
Initially, the idea was focused on protecting individual households. However, the focus quickly shifted to where the risk and financial loss were highest: large industrial sites such as waste and resource recovery facilities.
This provided the business case for developing a powerful, sophisticated, and always-on system – a kind of permanent, digital firefighter capable of preventing small thermal incidents from becoming total write-offs for businesses.
The system operates by coordinating high-grade vision and powerful action. FLIR thermal cameras provide the vision, detecting a fire’s earliest heat signature and feeding data to the AI “brain”, which then triggers Elkhart Brass fire monitors, or water cannons, as well as alerting fire authorities and other critical contacts. Even if communications are down, the system continues to suppress the fire independently.
Nick says this setup allows the system to put out a typical fire in as little as 25 seconds after the first ignition.
“The system connects directly to the site’s local industrial fire mains, capable of delivering a firefighter-grade flow of up to 2800 litres a minute in a high-pressure jet, projected to a maximum distance of 65 metres,” he says.
Developing a technology that needs to be right every single time requires intense, real-world validation. FlameSmart underwent a gruelling 10 months of extensive live fire trials at a Victorian waste transfer station to iron out every detail and edge case.
One surprise challenge demonstrated the technical precision required.
“The thermal camera was set up so that it could see just outside the building,” Nick recalls.
“We started getting false alarms every evening at a certain time. It turned out that it was being triggered by the sunset. We cropped the thermal camera image to ignore those pixels outside the building. Boom, it’s gone. No false alarm.
“It was fascinating conducting the trial because you learn so much about the details of the equipment. It’s highly precise equipment, and it does a great job.”
The system’s fast response is essential even during working hours. Nick cites a case, before FlameSmart was installed, where paint thinners, crushed by a bulldozer, caused a small fire that “crawled rapidly up to the top of the waste pile”.
While the onsite team quickly dealt with the chemical fire, the incident demonstrated the speed with which a flame can climb an unseparated waste pile, a massive vulnerability that only a machine capable of a near-instant, high-flow response can mitigate.
For the growing threat of lithium-ion battery fires, Nick says the system’s role is slightly different but no less critical.
Since lithium fires can only be extinguished by submerging the material, FlameSmart aims to stop the spread to surrounding, combustible fuel sources, protecting the building until the battery burns out or the fire brigade can safely isolate the material.
When the fire brigade does arrive, the system seamlessly integrates.
FlameSmart works with local fire brigades to include the system in their pre-incident plan, allowing them to either easily switch off the autonomous system to take over, or in high-pressure situations, even run the systems in parallel.
Nick says the response from emergency services has been positive: “They are happy to turn up and see that the critical first battle has already been fought and won.”
But the argument for FlameSmart goes beyond fire safety.
The technology is a critical investment in business continuity and financial risk mitigation.
“A catastrophic fire can put a business out of operation on that site for potentially two years during a rebuild,” Nick says.
“The second major impetus is insurance. The interest from the insurance industry has been significant, validating the technology as a genuine risk reduction tool that translates into reduced premiums and, crucially, reduced risk to capital.”
For more information, visit: www.flamesmart.com.au
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