Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FIREOUT (First fully autonomous fire detection and extinction system for industrial settings)
Reporting period: 2019-05-01 to 2019-08-31
Industrial fires cost billions of euros, produce severe environmental damages and loss of life. Fire is especially relevant in industrial facilities storing large quantities of highly flammable material. Here, fires are very frequent and extremely devastating. These facilities require suitable fire detection and extinguishing systems (FDES) adapted to the supervision of industrial settings. Current FDES have proved to be inefficient to reduce the number of fires and its consequences in industrial facilities, especially those storing significant amounts of highly flammable material. FIREOUT uses unprecedent IR spectra analysis developed by GROMA247 to fast, unequivocally and reliably detect a fire in less than 60 sec. so the FDES can work without the need of human intervention. Further, FIREOUT is disrupting the fire extinction market thanks to its 3D mapping feature enabling a very precise direction of the suppression agent stream.
We have planned the technical activity for the optimization of new HW, improving the SW architecture and perfecting the prediction algorithms. We designed the testing of the upgraded prototype at 2 early users´ facilities and the plan for EN54 certification. The market analysis demonstrates its commercial viability in industries storing highly flammable material. Competitors in and out the EU have been studied, market barriers for the introduction in the industrial sector have been identified and mechanisms have been set to overcome them. Several market and project implementation risks have been assessed and we have prepared a management plan including mitigation. Technology watch has also been performed through patent search, allowing us to confirm our market position and update the intellectual property protection path.
FIREOUT’s camera, data processing and learning algorithms allow to surpass current existing solutions based on plain thermographic images or traditional sensor technology in the fire detection market. It allows drastic reduction of false alarms and reducing the number of fires in industrial facilities across different sectors. It contributes at lowering the number of fatalities and cutting down on company safety costs. Moreover, FIREOUT will help to obtain affordable fire insurance primes in the industrial sector. Our economic study confirms the potential of the project with an estimated GROMA247 4-fold revenue increase in 3 years after market launch and the number of employees multiplied by 4 in 5 years.