Project Brief
Post Grenfell, 40,000 Uk residents are still living in buildings with highly flammable cladding exteriors (Independent, 2019). Quotes for remediation have typically been £4m-£5m (Booth, 2019) Even with support from government funding, most building management schemes cannot afford it. The best product currently on the market to keep high risk residents safe is the traditional fire sprinkler, however the vast majority of London’s flammable exterior high rise buildings do not have a sprinkler system installed. Retrofitting sprinklers is too expensive (costing approximately £1,150 per flat) and inconvenient on the residents. The purpose of this project was to design a retrofit sprinkler alternative that is both affordable and easy to install.
Project Outcome: Oltó
Using flame, smoke, Co2 and heat sensors, Oltó is able to constantly monitor rooms for fire. Upon detection of a fire, Oltó will alert the user via a mobile device and a built in alarm. The user will then assess the validity of the alarm, using the built in camera and sensor statistics, and choose to activate or deactivate Oltó’s fire extinguish protocol.
If the user does not respond to the alert, Oltó will self activate. There is no risk of self activation causing water damage to the property as Oltó does not use water. Instead, it uses flame activated powder cartridges which can simply be picked up by the user and placed back into the unit if a false activation ever occurred.
Finally, users have the option to manually override the product and extinguish a fire by hand.
How flame activated powder cartridges work
Flame activated cartridges are made from polystyrene and filled with dry powder that smothers and reacts with a fire to extinguish it.
Wrapped around the cartridge is a detonating cord that when present to a flame, will ignite and travel into its core.
At the core of the cartridge is a small pocket of gun powder (highlighted in red).
When the detonating cord reaches the gun powder, the contained explosion will break the polystyrene body and disperse the dry powder in all directions, effectively smothering the fire.
The polystyrene is dyed blue to abide with the British standard BS EN 3-7 which states that 10% of the surface area of the extinguisher body must be coloured to identify the extinguishing agent (blue for powder extinguishers).
A label is stuck over the detonating cord to give the cartridge a clean look and to stop the cord from unwinding.
