AUTOMATIC WATER SPRINKLERS

AUTOMATIC WATER SPRINKLERS

ABSTRACT

    The enormous growth of businesses and industry in recent times resulted in increase in fire hazards and the expected loss of property in turn necessities adequate protection against fire. The conventional fire protection systems like water pails, sand pipes and hose equipment are sometimes proved inadequate in case of delayed detection unit the advent of the automatic sprinklers.
    The forerunners of the automatic sprinkler were the perforated pipe and open sprinkler. These were installed in a number of mills during the period 1850 to 1880. The systems were not automatic; the discharge openings of the pipes often clogged with rust and foreign materials and water distribution was poor.
    Open sprinkles, an improvement over perforated pipes, consisted of metal bulb with numerous perforations attached to piping and intended to give improved water distribution. This system was only slightly better than the perforated one.
    The idea of Automatic Sprinkler Protection, in which heat from a fire opens one or more sprinklers and allows the water to flow, dates back to 1860. Its practical application begun in 1878 in USA when the Parmelee sprinkler was first installed. This sprinkler while very crude when compared with modern devices gave generally good results and proved conclusively that automatic sprinkler protection was both practical and valuable. The early automatic sprinkler is shown on Figure (1) because of the ongoing research and development work. Automatic sprinklers are becoming more and more practicable for protecting modern industrial, commercial and marginal practices and in the modern scenario large areas, high values or many people cannot be protected adequately without automatic fixed fire protection.
    The importance of Automatic sprinklers for prevention of large scale damage and catastrophe was amply proved during the terrorist attack on the US Defense Headquarters, on 11th Sept. 2001. A report on the same by NFPA reads as follows:-
Fire sprinklers limit loss at the pentagon sept15, 2001- at a DoD press conference today on the Pentagon damage and renovation program, the project manager, Lee Evey, credited the buildings fire sprinklers with limiting the damage caused by the terrorist attack. He said, “Fire sprinklers, interestingly, you know, there was a fire that raged through two, the innervated area. If you look at wedge once, except in those areas where it was clearly fueled by jet fuel, look the fire, when it tried to spread into other wedge one areas, was knocked down immediately by the fire sprinklers. There were virtually no spread whatsoever, so we saw a tremendous beneficial effect from that”.