Spray Hoses and Water Curtains
The figure below shows a neighborhood that has been surrounded by a special spray hose pair. The other figure is a closeup of the spray hose pair.
The spray hose pair has two parallel fluid chambers. One is a conventional chamber that transports water.
The other chamber has orifices along its length which create a spray curtain when water is pumped through this chamber.
The yellow 4WD vehicle in the above figure has deployed a mile of hose around a neighborhood. The vehicle has a large reel in its bed, and it drives around the neighborhood while deploying the spray hose. If necessary, others vehicles assist in carrying and deploying the hose.
The vehicle has a large fire pump in its bed which sucks water from a pond and pumps the water into the hose lay.
Note that at 3 locations along the hose there is a white box associated with the hoses. Each box is remotely controlled by the wire pair data network, and each box has a valve that can control water flow into the spray chamber of the next hose segment. Each segment can have a different amount of spray curtain height/flow.
In the figure above, only the spray curtain at the top of the image is spraying because a fire is coming from the top of the image.
The spray hose has an embedded wire which supports an Ethernet type digital data network which determines which sections of spray hose will acutally spray.
PriorResearch Suggesting Use of Water Curtain
Prof.
Albert Simeoni, of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, has published an article titled “Physical
modeling of forest fire spreading through heterogeneous fuel beds.”(1)
His web page is http://www.wpi.edu/academics/facultydir/as4.html
He states that “putting as much water as possible on the fire front, to stop it, becomes ineffective under extreme conditions.”
He also states that “Sprinklers randomly distributed in the borders of the wildland-urban interface could improve passive fire protection while saving water.”
Dual Chambered Hose
My proposed dual chambered hose, has one chamber designed with appropriately spaced holes to create a continuous spray curtain.
The other hose chamber would be used to transport water to the next pump of a relay pumping hose lay.
The use of a dual chambered hose would allow for spraying only in hose segments where spraying was needed. Each pump in the relay would have a valve that controlled flow into the spray curtain chamber. Enabling spray from only selected hose segments would reduce the total amount of water pumped by the relay.
A paper titled “A Water Curtain for Controlling Experimental Forest Fires”(2) was
written by Von J. Johnson in 1970. His system used 8 inch aluminum
irrigation pipe which fed a series of sprinkler nozzles that were on 5
foot high risers. The total volume of water used was 1200 gpm.
Each
nozzle furnished 10 gpm at a pressure of 35 psi.
Johnson concludes by stating “The water curtain appears to be particularly suited for controlling prescribed fires in areas having adequate water sources nearby and minimal topographical relief.” Our proposed dual chambered hose would work in a relay pumping system that could deliver water to areas that do not have adequate water sources nearby.
The
author stated that “The system is designed to control prescribed fires
and is not sufficiently mobile for controlling fast-spreading
wildfires.” “Approximately twelve 8-hour man-days are required to
assemble the full system under average field conditions.”
Click HERE to see the paper.
The Johnson and the Simeoni papers suggest that a hose with a water curtain option is a worthwhile tool for firefighters the the WUI.
More details of the invention may be seen in an article in Wildfire Magazine September/October 2011, http://wildfiremag.com/technology/pump-relay-network-system-201109/index.html
References:
(1) International Journal of Wildland Fire 2011, 20, 625-632
(2) Research Paper NC-48 (1970) USDA
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