| Abstract: |
Recent investigations have been conducted into effective, lightweight, non-halon fire protection techniques for mitigating aircraft vulnerability to ballistic threat-induced fires. This paper describes investigations to identify and demonstrate enhanced concepts for powder panels, a passive fire extinguishing device. Powder panels lining an aircraft dry bay can provide fire protection against ballistic impact by releasing powder into the fire zone to inert the space before the adjoining fuel spills into the space and is ignited by incendiaries. Much of this work was performed under the Next Generation Fire Suppression Technology Program (NGP), funded by the Department of Defense's Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program. The expected outcome of this work will be enhanced powder panel concepts that are competitive with halon 1301 in critical parameters such as weight, volume occupied, fire extinguishing capability, etc. and, thus, are candidates for use in its place. |
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