by Grayson Bellamy
My journey into the field of fire protection began at a young age. My father has been involved in it most of his life, and consequently, all of mine. Admittedly, in my early years, it never had much appeal to me. Growing up I always enjoyed school but had no definitive goal or career that I was aiming for. It wasn’t until high school that I truly got my first glimpse of the fire protection industry.
To complete the Magnet program at my high school I had to complete a Research and Internship course in my final year. I chose to complete it at my dad’s office. Under his guidance, I conducted research on “Accounting for Water Supply Fluctuations for Fire Protection Sprinkler Design.” My research involved surveying multiple municipalities about their water supply system and the periodic fluctuations they encountered. This was done to determine an appropriate safety factor to apply flow tests for the design of water-based sprinkler systems. This was my first experience in research and my entry into fire protection. It allowed me to see the work and engineering that went into the design of such systems and how much thought and care it took.
A couple of years later, I again got the opportunity to engage in some research with Telgian Corporation. This time it was at UL in Northbrook, IL. Here I was able to participate in the realm of full-scale fire testing. It gave me a real interest in the field of fire research and I got to experience the hard decisions that went into designing the appropriate tests that were sufficiently difficult to pass. This is what inspired me to continue down the fire research route.
When looking for an internship for the summer of 2019, I came across a job posting for the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), part of UL Research Institutes, and instantly knew I found what I was looking for. To be involved in research that directly affects the tactics and safety of firefighters – that was something that jumped out at me. Impactful work is something that is very important to me.
After joining the FSRI team for summer, I quickly got involved with the National Fire Sprinkler Association (NFSA) Demonstration Trailer project. This project looks at the impact of fire sprinklers and closed doors on fire development. My primary responsibility on the project was developing the status display boards. The boards log data during the burns and provide live feeds of the temperature and system status. The trailer is used to spread the fire safety messages of the importance of sprinklers and smoke alarms, as well as the impact of compartmentation (open/closed doors) on fire dynamics. This project combined a lot of skills I was already familiar with and helped to further develop them.
This project would challenge both my mechanical and electrical design skills. I was tasked with designing the enclosure and control system for the demonstration sequence. Some of the work had already been accomplished prior to my arrival: the displays and controllers as well as a preliminary system to ingest thermocouple inputs were already available. This project still required monitoring of smoke alarms and the sprinkler system status as well as needing to serve as the controller of ignition.
I had to use my mechanical skills to design an enclosure that would secure the displays as well as provide space for mounting the electrical components required to run the system. Due to its close proximity to fire and water the assembly needed to stand up to a fair amount of damage and mistreatment.
The system involved a fair amount of electrical design that I was not too familiar with prior to this project. This required me to figure out how to supply power to the components and interface with different sensor devices. This required the manufacture of custom electrical and conduct a lot of soldering. Exposure to a project that required me to develop skills in electronics, soldering, fabrication, and data acquisition has been invaluable.
The final skill that this project helped me to evolve was programming. I had been exposed to Python as a programming language before and used it on smaller projects but nothing of quite this magnitude. This project required me to learn how to perform data manipulation and analysis using Python and code multi-threaded workloads. Different threads work to detect certain sensors and collect data from them. Others were used to update the display and keep track of the test time. All of this was crucial to maintaining control of the demonstration.
Many of the skills I have learned and honed this summer at FSRI will come in very helpful in my upcoming semester at the University of Georgia. My use of different sensor components and analog to digital converters will be useful in my Mechatronics System class and my use of single board computers will serve as a good basis to my Introduction to Micro-controllers class.