Fire protection on the right track

A Head-to-Head with AQUASYS and FOGTEC

EU Infrastructure asks experts from AQUASYS and FOGTEC for their opinions on the new technologies, challenges and the importance of fire protection concepts in the railway industry.

“The main advantage of a water mist system is its efficiency and damage reduction effect”
-Klemens Blasl, AQUASYS

EUI. Fire protection concepts need to consider the difficulty of accessing the scene of the fire in most railway cases. How do you approach this situation?
Klemens Blasl. Extensive fighting of fire incidents and evacuating the passengers in transport vehicles with less space represents a challenge to the operating staff and also to the passengers. A fix installed water mist fire suppression system, which can be activated immediately at the recognition moment of an incident and which fights the fire where it is exactly detected, seems to be the perfect answer to the question of how to approach the scene of fire. Further the water mist system is completely harmless to the human being using pure water. Therefore no intervention time to start this system would be needed and the water mist immediately improves the environmental conditions. This facilitates the evacuation of passengers and the approaching of the fire brigade.

Roger-Andre Dirksmeier. In general the evacuation and the access concept are one of the most important parts to protect the people. If this could not be realised by basic requirements or measures, than you have to think about active measures to help you to reach the protection goal. This is the reason that you cannot answer in general this point. It depends by the operation concept of the railway vehicle and by many other parameters like the environment or the track characteristics, if it makes sense to implement some active stuff.

EUI. What are the main challenges facing fire protection concepts for rolling stock and how are you tackling these challenges?
RD. The main aim is to create solutions with safe, comfortable and economic vehicles. Safe transport means not that an active system is needed. It has to be checked project wise by the different parameters. If active systems could help, makes sense or are required they have to be integrated in a smart way, have to realise a high availability and reliability with a minimum for life cycle costs. To realise this, a team of high skilled and specialised people with experience in railway vehicles is necessary. In no other fire protection company than FOGTEC you will find a team of so many people doing only rolling stock business to solve the daily challenges during integration of fire protection concepts.

KB. The main problem which have technologies without daily usage and therefore their justification is their acceptance. I remember many critical opinions about safety belts and later about airbags after their introduction into cars. Nowadays, nobody would accept buying a new car without the state of the art standard safety features, like safety belts, airbags, antilock braking system, etc.. It takes time to accept new technologies or their applications, but once settled in our mind we never want to miss them.

EUI. How do your water mist systems differentiate from conventional sprinklersystems?
KB. The main advantage of a water mist system is its efficiency and damage reduction effect. The system reaches better results of decreasing temperature and heat radiation by faster evaporation of the smaller water droplets and the three dimensional effect in the whole compartment. The low water consumption compared to sprinkler systems and therefore the low weight and small dimensions of the system even enabled the implementation of water mist fire fighting systems in rolling stock.

RD. In a railway vehicle it is extreme important to optimise everything regarding the weight and the dimensions of the systems or components. To reduce weight and dimensions, you have to use the water more effectively. To have a most effective system you have to optimise the energy transfer from the source to the medium, in this case the fire fighting medium. In a case of a sprinkler you have big droplets, which fall down and will be collected as water on the floor. But if you atomise the water in really small droplets, you generate a really big reaction surface to have an optimal flow of energy.

The result is a rapid cooling effect around the ignition source to protect people, the surrounding area and what is really important in regard to the running capability. It means also new possibilities for evacuation, running capability and new ideas in design.

EUI. In your opinion, how has the threat of terrorism affected the industry?
RD. This depends definitely by the country or area where you speak about this aspect. In mid-Europe there were no effects to the vehicle design, for example however, in Korea there are some influences in different approval tests (especially for the fire fighting system) caused by terrorism activities. In Australia, everybody is speaking about these aspects, but in fact: if you have events like in Madrid, no fire protection concept can help. And it could be not our aim to design vehicles that are designed for these events.

KB. There is no alternative to the indispensable public transportation in daily life and therefore our obligation is that we are faster in the existing competition between security technology and criminal effects. Such terrorist acts as in the Spanish Metro in the year 2004 are very difficult to completely prevent but developing technologies to protect people and property without losing flexibility and comfort is the industries’ main task to make the world safer.

EUI. What improvements are you currently seeing in the transport industry regarding fire and safety solutions?
KB. “Till the moment that something happens, nobody wants to think in security and protection systems.” This mentality changed in the last years by focusing on the availability of transport/traffic, consequential costs and economic losses caused by accidents. I see an improved concomitance and positive mutual influence between the manufacturers of passive fire protection, detection systems and fire fighting systems.

RD. During the last few years we noticed a change in mind in regard to fire protection on manufacturer side and also on the side if the approval bodies. There are a lot of trains running now with FOGTEC systems not because a fire protection system was required. In these cases the system is there to compensate other requirements, e.g. the fire barrier doors between the wagons, material requirements or fire resistance of walls between traction equipment and passengers. The results of this are more possibilities for a modern and open design, saving of weight, simplification of approval process, simplification of evacuation concept and finally it may have positive effects on the economic balance of the project.

EUI. What do you think the future holds in terms of safety issues on trains?
RD. We have to be careful for the future with different things. Actually a lot of different safety solutions are in discussion or came up, especially difficult if there is the discussion to use things in parallel. I think, we have a really good technical standard and we have to look for that we create not to complicate vehicles by more and more safety issues. Finally the costs for new trains would increase if we try to realise all possible situations. In the end the travellers have to pay for this. We should destroy the great chance of the moment for the railway industry (manufacturers and operators) to increase the signification of railway transport in modern systems by implementing too many new safety issues.

KB. Under the influence of globalisation people have to be more flexible at continuously increasing energy costs. People want to be faster and more comfortable at their destination for a cheap price. Passenger trains suppose to be one of the safest means of transport. To make sure that it remains fire fighting in Railway vehicles will become more important for providing fast and punctual connections.

Klemens Blasl studied Automation and Process Management in Austria and collected experience in Sales and Project Management in the whole world during his career. He is Head of Sales at company AQUASYS which has existed since 1993 and is the pioneer company in water mist fire fighting and expert for customer-optimised solutions.

Roger-André Dirksmeier is Product Manager Rail Systems at FOGTEC Fire Protection. He joined FOGTEC to build up the Rail Systems department and today Rail Systems are the market leader for innovative fire protection solutions in rolling stock applications.