First fully autonomous fire detection and extinction system for industrial settings
Fire is the most frequent hazard for industrial facilities processing or storing highly flammable material such recycling, waste-to-energy (W2E) and biomass plants. The waste management sector currently ranks as the 3rd most accident-prone industry, with fire being involved in nearly 80% of all accident occurrences. Fire represents one the biggest threats due to its devastating consequences: up to 70% of the companies suffering from a big fire report insolvency in the next year. Current fire protection systems do not accomplish the specific requirements of this type of industries yet. They have either a too long detection time (as those based on smoke detection) or a very high rate of false alarms (thermal detection). There are no automatic fire detection systems in the market as all of them require the permanent presence of a person that must determine whether the triggered alarm corresponds actually to a real fire. At GROMA247 we have brought together our expertise in fire prevention and software development to create FIREOUT, the first fire detection and extinction system in the market working fully autonomously and with a detection time below 1 minute. Our system captures thermal images with an IR camera that are processed by our outstanding SW that can unambiguously distinguish any hotspot from a real fire, reducing the number of false alarms to zero. In addition, we have incorporated an automatic fire extinction system linked to a 3D image able to direct the suppression agent only to the affected area. FIREOUT aims at reducing the unacceptable number of fire events happening in industrial facilities every year in Europe. We will positively impact this sector in terms of personnel safety and increase company’s benefits by reducing the impact of fire events in their businesses. Thanks to FIREOUT, at GROMA247 we expect to obtain revenues amounting €30 million and incorporate up to 25 new employees (headcount: 30) by the end of 2023.