Use of Fire-Extinguishing Balls for a Conceptual System of Drone-Assisted Wildfire Fighting

Burchan Aydin; Emre Selvi; Jian Tao; Michael Starek

doi:10.3390/drones3010017

journal article Open Access Feb 12, 2019

Use of Fire-Extinguishing Balls for a Conceptual System of Drone-Assisted Wildfire Fighting

Burchan Aydin Emre Selvi Jian Tao

Michael Starek

Drones Vol. 3 No. 1 pp. 17 · MDPI AG

View at Publisher Save 10.3390/drones3010017

Abstract

This paper examines the potential use of fire extinguishing balls as part of a proposed system, where drone and remote-sensing technologies are utilized cooperatively as a supplement to traditional firefighting methods. The proposed system consists of (1) scouting unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to detect spot fires and monitor the risk of wildfire approaching a building, fence, and/or firefighting crew via remote sensing, (2) communication UAS to establish and extend the communication channel between scouting UAS and fire-fighting UAS, and (3) a fire-fighting UAS autonomously traveling to the waypoints to drop fire extinguishing balls (environmental friendly, heat activated suppressants). This concept is under development through a transdisciplinary multi-institutional project. The scope of this paper encloses general illustration of this design, and the experiments conducted so far to evaluate fire extinguishing balls. The results of the experiments show that smaller size fire extinguishing balls available in the global marketplace attached to drones might not be effective in aiding in building fires (unless there are open windows in the buildings already). On the contrary, results show that even the smaller size fire extinguishing balls might be effective in extinguishing short grass fires (around 0.5 kg size ball extinguished a circle of 1-meter of short grass). This finding guided the authors towards wildfire fighting rather than building fires. The paper also demonstrates building of heavy payload drones (around 15 kg payload), and the progress of development of an apparatus carrying fire-extinguishing balls attachable to drones.

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Metrics

121

Citations

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References

Details

Published: Feb 12, 2019
Vol/Issue: 3(1)
Pages: 17
License: View

Authors

B

Burchan Aydin

Department of Engineering & Technology, Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2600 W Neal St., Commerce, TX 75428, USA

E

Emre Selvi

Department of Engineering, Jacksonville University, 2800 University Blvd N, Jacksonville, FL 32211, USA

J

Jian Tao

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, High Performance Research Computing, and Texas A&M Institute of Data Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA

M

Michael Starek

School of Engineering and Computing Sciences, Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying and Science, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, 6300 Ocean Drive Unit 5868, Corpus Christi, TX 78412, USA

Cite This Article

Burchan Aydin, Emre Selvi, Jian Tao, et al. (2019). Use of Fire-Extinguishing Balls for a Conceptual System of Drone-Assisted Wildfire Fighting. Drones, 3(1), 17. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones3010017

Use of Fire-Extinguishing Balls for a Conceptual System of Drone-Assisted Wildfire Fighting

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