Draeger offers two broad categories of flame detection. One is the same category that all of our competitors offers, which is flame detection based on infrared or ultraviolet energy, and many of those detectors are either combinations of those two technologies, UV IR, or combinations of the same types of technologies like triple IR. The inherent issues with those technologies are that they’re prone to false alarms, because they rely on the ultraviolet or infrared energy getting from the flame to the detector, and if that infrared or ultra violet energy is blocked by common things like moisture, rain, snow, the detector can’t properly read the fire or the flame because the energy never gets to the detector. The other issue with those standard technologies is that they’re subject to false alarms, because reflected UV IR energy from non hazardous things like welding, controlled flames like flares, and even heat from machines, can create an alarm, even though it’s not an uncontrolled fire or a flame.
Draeger parted with another company almost twenty years ago to license a video flame technology that overcomes all the inherent issues with these standard technologies. So video flame detection does not false alarm, and can accurately read in all weather conditions, snow, rain etc because it’s not reading the energy reflected back from the fire of the flame, it’s actually looking at the pixels, and can determine when there’s an uncontrolled fire, versus a controlled flame like welding or flares on an oil or gas rig. So in the nearly twenty years that these have been deployed in the field, there’s no documented case of a false alarm. The video technology also happens to have the advantage of recording in video format, any alarms, and those alarms record 8 seconds before the alarm and 8 seconds after the alarm, so someone can actually literally look at what led up to to the alarm, and what tripped the alarm, and that gives the user the ability to solve the problem, and investigate a fire.
The detectors also have the advantage of having a much broader field of view than UV or IR detectors which typically have a fall off in their detection capability once you move away from the center of the view of the camera. Video detection doesn’t have that issue so all of the pixels in the full image all have the same detection capability, so fewer cameras can cover a much broader area, and in setting up the cameras and commissioning them, we have the advantage that you literally look through the camera and position each camera to cover specific areas so not only do you not have to worry about having overlap, you don’t have any missed areas, and that’s also an inherent problem with UV and IR cameras, is that commissioning them and positioning them becomes difficult because it’s an estimation. So customers end up using many more cameras than they use with video. So video imaging is a little more expensive than the standard technologies but in the projects we’ve done, we find that we can use fewer cameras, and get better results. So in the end it’s a lower cost for the customer in terms of initial cost, and a much lower cost because we don’t have false alarms. False alarms typically trip suppression systems, that interrupts the process, and causes a lot of cost in terms of cleanup.
