Swiss development: heat-resistant drone for firefighting

class=”sc-29f61514-0 jbwksb”>

In the future, such drones will take over the dangerous jobs of the fire department, the Federal Materials Testing and Research Institute Empa wrote in a statement Monday. “If a drone does the initial situation reconnaissance, we don’t need to send firefighters to the danger zone right away. This progress is extremely interesting for us,” said Stefan Keller, fire brigade training coordinator of the building insurance company in the Canton of Zurich.

Drones are already being used to fight fires. According to Empa, they take aerial photographs, lift fire hoses to high-rise buildings, or throw extinguishers in remote areas. However, only at a safe distance from the fire source. Electronics and batteries in flying robots cannot withstand the extreme heat in the middle of the fire.

Empa researchers, in collaboration with researchers from Imperial College London (UK), have developed a new type of insulation that can withstand high temperatures. According to the announcement, the “FireDrone” insulation consists of an airgel. An ultra-light material composed almost entirely of air-filled pores. Materials researchers chose an airgel based on polyimide plastic for the drone. These are also being investigated by NASA, for example, for the insulation of space suits.

In tests at the Andelfingen training center in the canton of Zurich, the insulated drone passed the acid test. “FireDrone”‘s electronics, thermal imaging camera and CO2 sensors remained undamaged even after several flights through the fire.

The next step, according to the researchers, is to test how the drone can handle the intense soot generation. The drone was recently presented to experts in the expert magazine “Advances Intelligent Systems”.

(SDA)

Source : Blick