Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A quick-acting sprinkler system has been developed for the protection of racked storages. It consists essentially of a number of "zones" of open sprinkler heads, each zone of heads being each on the same vertical supply pipe which is fed from a horizontal mains supply pipe on the opening of a valve. The valve is operated by a line detector distributed throughout the racking within the protected "zone", so that a fire starting within the zone brings the appropriate sprinklers into action. It has been shown experimentally that this system is very successful in detecting and controlling a fire during its very early stages, and some of the most difficult fires have been extinguished by it.