Ukrainian researchers are ready to offer novel smoke sensors to air companies

By Svetlana Sytina
The Ukrainian Times

A fire alarm system falls under a number of systems of the highest category in consideration of the criteria of responsibility for safety both of the object in which the system is installed and people in it. For instance, the flight of aircraft is cancelled if the fire alarm system is out of order, or the flight is interrupted if the system goes off.

Data from international air companies show that a fire alarm turned out to be false in nine out of 10 cases when signaling devices went off. And the broken flights cost a pretty penny. That is why the modernization of signaling devices of the fire alarm system is the urgent task that faces aviation on a world-wide scale.

The results of research done by a group of scientists led by Prof. Vladimir Maslov of the Institute of Semiconductor Physics under the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine allowed them to establish that the phenomenon of surface plasmon resonance enables discrimination between smoke and dust. It is the dust that produces the same physical effect as smoke, causing the false activation of signaling devices of the fire alarm system.

If there is the requisite financing, novel multichannel intelligent smoke sensors will have been developed by the above group of researchers on completion of this project. They believe these sensors will be widely used in modern life.

Additional information: vpmaslov@ukr.net