Life and property safety systems

By GST Holdings

In today’s challenging environment designing and installing a high quality fire detection and alarm system is fundamental to save lives and protect property. From the outset the designer should consider all aspects of the environment that the system is being installed to protect.

Addressable Systems that pin point the actual location of the fire used to be considered a luxury, now that cost of ownership have greatly decreased nearly everyone is choosing addressable as a standard solution. 

Most addressable systems can now provide loop powered inputs and outputs, sounders and strobes thus reducing the need for additional expensive cable and installation. The capacity of devices per loop have increased over the years enable a smaller control panel to cater for larger premises, once again reducing cabling and expensive labour.

Voice Evacuation is also now considered a standard solution for all buildings were general public or people that are unfamiliar with the surroundings. Voice Evacuation provides an actual verbal instruction of when to prepare or when to actually evacuate the building. Voice Evacuation Systems can now provide additional benefits to the end user, as they can now be used to provide back ground music and general paging facilities, providing the user with some daily benefits.

Fire Telephone Systems are now readily specified in high rise buildings providing the fire officer with a fixed installation that can enable him to talk directly with his fire team on each floor of the building.

Detection In Depth
Ionisation Detectors used to be widely utilised as they provided an effective and efficient way to detect burning matter at an early stage. The problems with Radioactive disposal pushed the industry to look for a suitable alternative. Photo electric detectors provided a suitable alternative but during the earl stages they were not as effective as Ionisation. Over the years the photo electric detector has been perfected and now they can respond faster than ionisation for all types of burning matter and visible smoke.

With the need to provide early warning detection, flame detectors were developed, these provide an excellent response for applications that have hazardous storage or processes. This still left a gap in the industry for very early warning systems for clean rooms, large open spaces, warehouses, atriums and other areas where standard detectors would not provide a fast enough response. This requirement has now been tackled with the development of Fire and Smoke Detectors that use standard CCTV cameras to detect a given space.

Statistics show that within high risk environments 14 fires occur per 1,000 buildings taking hundreds of lives each year, costing businesses and insurers billions of dollars. These statistics can be changed by installing Fire and Smoke Intelligent Eye Solution within your premises.

Fire and Smoke Intelligent Eye Solutions are extremely cost effective as most of the ideal applications for this application already have CCTV cameras. Therefore, you may not need to install any cameras, cables or equipment. Furthermore, if you do not have CCTV cameras protecting your facility this could be the ideal solution to protect and maintain your early warning fire detection, security and productivity levels.

Fire and Smoke Intelligent Eye Solutions are based on sophisticated software algorithms running inside a computer which analysis simultaneously video images provided by CCTV cameras. Fire and Video Intelligent Eye Solutions utilize standard CCTV cameras, colour, monochrome, infrared, existing or new linked to 4 channel self contained processing system. These systems are capable of recognizing simultaneously smoke and flame patterns within the video image. Sophisticated software algorithms automatically identify the specific motion pattern of smoke and flames while ignoring other on-screen movement patterns from up to eight cameras simultaneously.

Fire and Video Intelligent Eye Solutions are excellent for applications where traditional smoke detection technologies may prove to be impractical or slow to respond.

Where and why should you consider Installing Fire and Smoke Intelligent Eye Solution
Large open areas both indoor and outdoor, high ceilings such as warehouses and manufacturing plants, areas with high air flows that can prevent smoke from reaching a spot-type smoke detector, delaying an alarm activation. Applications include warehouses, aircraft hangers, industrial processing plants, power generation plants, tunnels, mass transit facilities, shopping malls, historic structures, or areas that are inaccessible or unsafe for traditional detection technology. Fire and Smoke Intelligent Eye Solution can detector smoke and flame from any visible location.

Smoke Stratification
Traditional Point Type Smoke Detectors, Heat Detectors and Beam Detectors have to be installed to meet International Standards. These type of devices can not be negated but due to the environmental conditions they should be supplemented with an early warning system that can save life’s, machinery, stock, your building and also potentially your business. In a smouldering fire or low energy flaming fire scenario the raising combustion products cool as they rise through the air and move further away from the source of the combustion. In a temperature-stratified environment the ambient air temperature increases with height. As the combustion plume rises it cools, if this cooling reaches equilibrium with the temperature of the ambient air the smoke products will loose their buoyancy and move laterally to producing a horizontal layer.  If the temperature slowly increases the hot air above the smoke will expand thus further reducing the height of the smoke stratification layer. Beam detectors provide a level of detection but due to the physical barrier restrictions these are also sometimes ineffective.

Smoke stratification also occurs when solar radiation creates a hot layer of air under the ceiling of an enclosed area. When the hot layer of air is warmer than the smoke plume, it will prevent the smoke reaching ceiling-mounted point-type detectors. This is particularly prolific within Middle Eastern and Asian environments.

There are other early warning devices such as air sampling, however the speed of response is restricted by the length of pipe and the physical location of where and how the pipe can be installed.

Some Intelligent Eye Systems can be divided into 1096 zones each with their own sensitivity levels. This can be particularly useful where there maybe background smoke within certain environments. Furthermore, each zone can be cross-referenced with each other providing single and double knock scenarios. Fire and Smoke Intelligent Eye Solutions utilizes highly complex algorithms to process video information from CCTV cameras simultaneously. The video hardware allows simultaneous real time digitising of all images, our system does not multiplex images ensuring no information is lost or delayed. All alarm condition images are logged, time & date stamped, and stored within the system’s memory.

Sophisticated Fire and Smoke Intelligent Eye Solutions should have a series of filters which the video information is fed through, inbuilt algorithms characterize the information being received and cross-reference the information with thousands of smoke and flame pre-installed algorithms within seconds.

Systems Providing Auto Mapping
Many system designers like to specify auto mapping systems, this is were a detection system during commissioning phase is set to auto map and it will pole the devices connected to that loop and assign an address allowing the engineer to then assign a suitable location tag for the device i.e. general managers office 1st floor. There are a few fundamental reasons why systems that utilise this technology should not be considered. Firstly it is essential that the fire detection engineer actually visits every detectors location, to ensure it has been installed in the correct location i.e. not too close to a air conditioning supply grill or close to a light fitting. These two common issues delay the speed of response of the device. Secondly the fire commissioning engineer should verify the actual location as often the wiring will be done by a different contractor and very often the system will not be wired in the same physical way as shown on the drawings. Therefore the device that he thought was the general managers office may actually be in a completely different location. This could prove deadly and will waist critical time when investigating an incident. Lastly, there are no benefits to the end user for self addressing systems, it only benefits lazy engineers who want short cuts.

Network Solutions
As more and more systems are installed there is a growing demand for the ability to network systems across areas, towns, regions and even countries. Most cities now provide central monitoring solutions to provide a rapid response to any given incident. This you may feel is quite a simple solution, which is true, the clever part of this solution would be to provide  fully automatic predictive online maintenance for your systems. As system develop in intelligence it now possible for your detection system to advise you of when a device needs cleaning to avoid that device from either operating falsely or worse not operating at all.

Sprinkler Monitoring and Interfacing
Many designers now ensure that the complete sprinkler systems are monitored by the fire detection. This is critical for the safety and protection of lives and the property. Many fires have erupted when the isolation valve has been closed on a floor or an area and someone has forgotten to open the valve when there works are complete. It is therefore essential that every isolation valve is monitored by the fire detection system and that a fault will be continually present until the valve has been returned to normal condition.

It is also quite common now for the status of the entire fire suppression system to be monitored such as pump status, water tank and fuel levels. Previously this has been expensive to achieve as the cost of installing all of these cables from the pump room to reception. Some companies now have a tailor made solution were you can monitor all the devices via your fire detection loop and then annunciate these signals via a communication card directly to a bespoke indicator panel. This type of solution saves thousands of dollars on cabling and provides a clear and precise diagrammatic indication of the status of the system.

The GST group is one of the worlds leading high tech business specialising in the design, development, manufacturing and marketing of a complete range of Intelligent Fire Detection and Control Systems, Building Automation Systems, Intelligent Residence Systems, Power Instruments and District Management Systems, with Offices in three continents.

GST employs over 3000 personnel in the Group, enabling us to provide you with a true worldwide expertise with a local service. We at GST are very proud of our purpose built state of the art facilities, constructed on 4 hectares of land providing over 100,000 square meters of high tech facilities.

We are capable of producing over six million sensors and hundreds of thousands of ancillary devices per annum, while our Power metering division produces over one million intelligent power and water meters each year.

Our company heavily invests in research and development, with our extensive team of over 90 graduate engineers (35% with Master Degrees) dedicated to continual improvement and product excellence.

GST performs on strict management policies, which are harmonious with our ISO 9001 manufacturing and quality management certification certified by LPCB. Over the years GST have gained international recognition and approvals from 9 testing bodies such as UL, LPCB, CE, PSB, SAI, HKFSD, CCC etc. Over 500,000 properties around the world enjoy the comfort and security of our products.

Our high tech manufacturing facilities utilizing surface-mount technology enables us to produce high volumes of quality products. We completely test all our equipment prior to leaving our factory providing you with a guaranteed quality product, which will not let you down.

We take fire detection extremely seriously and have designed and developed our range of products to provide solutions for the smallest simplest system up to the most demanding project. Over the years GST has been utilised on some of the most prestigious projects such as the Olympic Stadium and Olympic Village in Beijing. GST has been installed in the majority of International Hotel Brands, Banks and Multinationals.

GST have an extensive dealer network enabling all projects to be undertaken and supported locally throughout the world. The reliability of GST product has enabled our company to grow year on year and gain recognition throughout the world. 

Contact details:
Lee Dunn, Commercial Director
Mob: +971 50 458 4577, T: +971 (0) 4 88 33 050, F: +971 (0) 4 88 33 053, E: lee@gst.uk.com, W: www.gst.uk.com